


All the stars and the darkness between them

by orphan_account



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Allura needs a hug, Female Pronouns for Pidge | Katie Holt, Gen, Hunk (Voltron) is so Pure, Keith stabs all his problems, Kuro needs a nap, Lance vs self esteem, Lotor plots, Political intrigue and canapes, Shiro goes on the universe's worst roadtrip, The Holts will save us
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-08
Updated: 2017-12-07
Packaged: 2018-12-12 16:35:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 33,981
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11740935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: “I can feel him rooting through my head. I don’t know what he wants. I don’t know what he’ll  do.” at last, Shiro raises his head. Thace and Slav each take a step back. "Get me to Voltron,” says Shiro in an undertone “I’ll tear off the imposter's head and feed it to Zarkon if he’s hurt my family.”Several thousand light-years away, another Shiro knocks back a glass of water, praying it will turn into vodka on the way down his throat, and stifles a small burp "Alright, kids. We've got a war to fight and few resources to fight it with, so every move counts. Ideas- Lance, put your hand down, you're just gonna say 'rollerskates' again."In which Shiro fights his way back to his rag-tag family, another Shiro realises he may not be who he thinks he is, the Paladins suffer and Lotor's hair seems to get shinier with every battle.





	1. “Watch out, Lotor! Our justice is swift and fabulous!”

**Author's Note:**

> Key to the lions' nicknames: Guapa= Blue, Greenbean= Green, Edgy= Red, Boss Ma'am = Black, Kitty= Yellow

(The planet Bagorraia)

When you’re a gigantic inter-galactic robotic weapon composed ostentatiously of inter-galactic lions in mostly primary colours, subtlety isn’t exactly an option. Especially when one of the legs of said robotic weapon does not quite know how to steer herself. 

The valley was quite empty when Coran pointed it out as an ideal place to train with Voltron. Nothing down there but some straggly native grass that would survive a bit of scorching and stomping. The nearest settlement on this recently liberated planet was a safe distance away, but Lance took it upon himself to jet over in the red and let the villagers know that they were about to train, that there was no reason to panic, and the Galra empire was still firmly displaced from their home-world. But the amount of interest Voltron generates, along with noise and flashing lights and smoke and sometimes the faint echoes of a paladin screaming, are simply irresistible to a crowd.   
By now they have drawn a sizable crowd. They line the edges of the valley, still safely out of range from Voltron, but close enough to witness every embarrassment from all the best angles.

“I think I’m favouring my Hunk- my Kitty- left, I mean left.” says Keith up in the head “Kitty and Guapa- these damn legs are different sizes-”

“The shock absorbers in our knees are a little creaky after the last battle,” Pidge is saying to somebody, or everybody “We’ve got the giant robot equivalent of arthritis in our knees today. The lions needed more time to finish healing up from liberation-”

“-the lever right beside you. Pull it towards you, and it should let you adjust the leg room.” says Lance to Allura, having to raise his voice to be heard over the rest of the chatter on the intercom.

“Ah, that’s done it! Thank you. I can’t tell you how much better this feels. I can actually reach the dashboard now.”

At the same time Hunk is trying to have a conversation with Pidge “It’s weird how the healing rates are balancing out. The seriously traumatic battle we had before this, with Lotor, we were fine after about two days of non-action.”

“Well Guapa’s been taking a lot more damage since Allura got her- no offense, Allura- so maybe it’s just that.”

“Ok, I need some radio silence up here!” snaps Keith “I can’t hear what Boss Ma’am is saying to me, let alone my own thoughts.”

Lance sees his opportunity and dives for it “What does it sound like when you think? Is it Black Parade on a loop?”

Coran watches from a set of cliffs facing Voltron. He can hear the general chaos inside the machine via a headpiece, and has not yet decided if it should make him grateful the revised team remains enthusiastic about their duties, or fill him with dread at the thought of these chattering buffoons pitting themselves against a violent empire. As the robot lists from side to side in the manner of a drunk, its arms pinwheeling in a brave effort to keep its balance, Coran thinks faintly that perhaps it is a mercy Alfor did not survive to see his magnum opus like this, uncoordinated and lunatic in the hands of a bunch of teenagers, much less hear the conversation. Between them they have less than a hundred deca-phoebs- and there are five of them!

“What are they doing?” mumbles Shiro. He drops his face into his hands. For a moment Coran is concerned Shiro has had it with the world and is about to dash himself off the cliffs, but he raises his head with a wry smile in place “Be honest with me, Coran. When I was up in the head did we ever look like that?”

“- don’t like MCR very much,” Keith says loudly over the intercoms “The front-man, Jared Leto, he gave me nightmares as a kid.”

The grin is obvious in Lance’s voice “That’s Gerard Way. You’re thinking of the guy from Thirty Seconds to-”

“Perhaps not this…” Coran searches for a gentle word “…ungraceful, but certainly you had some difficulty moving correctly. Voltron is an unwieldy thing in space. Even more so on land. When you battled everyone was in their original lions.”

Shiro’s face grows wistful as he tracks Voltron’s bobbing head “I’m trying my hardest. I really am, but she won’t respond to me.”

“Ah, it’s not your fault, chap. The lions are temperamental beasts. Smart and devoted, too. This may be her way of strengthening the team as a whole. I wouldn’t worry about it. They’re doing fine”

Voltron lifts its blue foot. The boot splits into Guapa’s mouth and spews a few hundred litres of water from its mouth with enough force to break one of the boulders it strikes. On the other side of the valley, a spontaneous cheer goes up from the spectators.

“I’m so sorry about that everyone!” this is Allura. She might be on the verge of tears or on the verge of ripping out the windshield in frustration “I don’t know what I just did!”

“You hit Guapa’s fire extinguisher. It’s not your fault- that button is right next to the temperature control.”

Hunk laughs “I didn’t know we could do that!”

The sound of Pidge’s pen on notepad floods the intercoms “Greenbean stimulates plant growth, Edgy turns into a sword and sometimes shoots fire, Boss Ma’am teleports…ok, if we have a fire-extinguisher do you think that’s meant to balance out Edgy’s fire? I’m telling you, Hunk, Voltron is a balanced machine. Every disaster one lion can cause is compensated for by another lion’s ability-”

“I swear to God I am absolutely favouring Hunk.”

At last Shiro speaks up “Your stance is fine.”

Voltron’s giant face swivels towards Shiro. Pidge’s arm waves, which causes a fresh burst of laughter out of Hunk.

“Your teamwork, on the other hand, is a little haywire. Take a knee. Figure out what you’re doing before you start doing it- no, Allura, it’s a figure of speech.”

Too late. Allura has bent them over. Pidge leans on their knee for balance and makes Voltron look for all the world like a man who has just found a penny on the sidewalk.

“Sorry.” squeaks Allura.

“No problem.” says Keith “We’re not swaying anymore. Ok, I want us to walk in a straight line from here to the other end of the valley. No stumbling. No tripping. We’ll see if we can do that ten times in a row, then move up to running. Working on swordsmanship isn’t going to do a thing for us if we can’t walk straight.”

Again, Lance sees an opportunity for a zinger “Not that you can do anything straight, right Keith?”

Even Allura laughs though she doesn’t understand the joke.

It is a clumsy start. First they must straighten up and find a comfortable position on the soles of their feet. This proves incredibly difficult because, as Keith noticed, the legs are different sizes and therefore it is hard to get the robot to stand up straight and even. Perhaps it was easier to do so when Lance was still a leg thanks to his and Hunk’s long friendship. The boys knew how to balance and accommodate each other, even with the enormous weight they supported.  
But Allura and Hunk have not been best friends since they were eleven years old. Allura was not there to witness the full horror of Hunk’s emo phase, nor did she ever paint his nails and watch Ghibli movies with him to counsel him through a break-up. And Hunk wasn’t there for Allura when she became convinced she would never amount to anything as the future leader of her people and ran away to one of Altea’s moons, living in a treehouse for two and a half weeks until her mother’s search party found her. Although if Hunk had been around he most certainly would have joined her as emotional support. 

The five or so months they have known each other may not be enough to build up the same kind of innate understanding the legs previously shared, but Allura has an idea.

“Hunk, I wonder if you would mind sticking your hip out a bit. If you took more of the weight that would give me some space to move.”

“Like this?”  
Hunk’s corrects his position so that Voltron has now got a hip cocked out to the side. Immediately, Allura is able to straighten out fully and the whole shape of Voltron is much straighter and more stable.

Keith sighs over the intercoms “Alright. We can work with this for now.”

“Oh God.” mumbles Shiro.

Coran thumps his shoulder “It’s progress.”

“I heard Shiro mumble,” says Keith “What? What’s wrong?”

“You look like you’re about to go down a cat-walk.”

Lance busts out laughing “Holy shit, we do!”

Voltron takes an uncertain step forward. His hips rotate invitingly. Sensing they are about to lose their balance, Pidge throws her hand up on a hip. Voltron might be flirting with the locals at the far end of the valley. Now even his expression seems flirty and coy, with perhaps the beginning of a smile playing out across his dented face.

“We’re gonna sashay our way to victory!” Lance sounds on the verge of tears “Watch out, Lotor! Our justice is swift and fabulous!”

As ridiculous as it looks to Shiro and Coran, it works. Voltron suddenly has a long and confident stride that enables him to cross the valley in thirteen steps. Though the extra weight on Hunk gives Voltron a slight limp, the team slowly coax Voltron up to a steady jog and are able to keep up the pace. Each of his footfalls is like a small earthquake. Shiro and Coran are bouncing up and down on their feet and have to back away from the edge of the cliffs for fear of being bounced right over.  
When Keith is confident they can run, he orders Lance to bring out the sword. At the sight of five or six stories’ worth of honed metal materialising in Voltron’s hand the locals cheer again. A chant of Voltron’s name lasts for several minutes, growing louder and fresher with each of the gentle swings Voltron makes.   
Keith guides the team through the beginnings of a kata that Shiro recognises from Aikido. Amazing that Keith would remember that year’s worth of afternoon lessons. Shiro feels a pang of guilt, remembering how he essentially banished Keith into an Aikido dojo for two hours every Thursday evening so he could squeeze in a few extra hours, back in the day he still worked in the nursery. Who knew Keith would one day apply the katas he memorised with a wooden sword to the control of a space robot wielding a sword made of trans-dimensional meteorite?

All the while the team joke and laugh and fill the intercom with chatter. Keith describes a couple of other katas he plans to try out later. Hunk tells a joke about a nun and a taxi cab driver, which gives Lance a small war flash-back to his days in a Catholic elementary school. He tells the story of the time he was forcefully ejected from Bible camp after scaring a priest so badly with a packet of ketchup and a well-timed screech that the staff of that camp genuinely believed he was possessed. Allura compares steering her leg to a sport she used to play on Altea and describes the whole thing in detail, patiently answering all of Lance’s question as to why they used lizards instead of what he calls ‘goalies’, and why they never tried using a round ball instead of a square ball.  
Pidge talks about her dog. She asks Shiro if Matt ever talked about their dog on the Kerebos mission, and Shiro tells her, dear God, he never shut up about that dog, he had me convinced the dog was Old Yeller, Red Dog, Lassie and Cerberus in one. 

By the time the third sun has begun to sink, signalling the end of this planet’s day, the team is exhausted. The crowd of locals drain away as Voltron disbands into the five lions. Kitty’s yellow head droops from the strain of having to carry most of Voltron’s weight. He sinks to the ground and lays on his back in the grass, to his and Hunk’s apparent relief. Edgy turns pinwheels, excited that she got to be a sword for so long. Greenbean is the closest thing to a kitten the team has so of course she has not yet used up her energy- she pounces on Guapa and entices her to play with a nip to the tail. It takes a few moments for Boss Ma’am to herd the lions towards the castle. 

Coran and Shiro are waiting on the bridge by the time the Paladins shuffle up . Pidge runs to Shiro and throws herself at his waist “Fight me!”

Shiro holds her back by the crown of her head and cranes his chin out of the way of her pinwheeling arms “You just spent the whole day playing war games.”

“Come on, Shiro! My biceps are getting saggy! I can feel my muscles shrivelling as we speak! We must do battle! To the training room! Two men enter, one Pidge leaves!”

“I’ll fight you in a second.” offers Keith “We should make sure the plan for tomorrow is still good.”

With a wave of her hand, Allura brings up the map of the galaxies. She brushes the planet Arus out of her face irritably “Right. I think Coran is right. We’ve been here long enough. Liberation finished up last week, and Voltron has been on planet No’orokel long enough to establish its protection. It’s time we moved on.”

“What were the options again?” Lance asks around a yawn. He slings an arm over Hunk’s shoulder and leans on his friend with drooping eyelids.

Shiro gestures to a small spiny moon orbiting a barren gas planet “Since we just finished a major liberation, I say we should aim for something smaller. Give the lions time to heal like Pidge says. What about the Galra station on Jausha?”

“I still say we should be using siege tactics.” puts in Hunk “I know we’re not trying to starve the empire, but I honestly think it would scare the empire into some stupid decisions if we took over a couple of moisture farms or a greenhouse moon.”

“Hunk, most greenhouse moons are close to heavily defended population centres- ancients, that was a big yawn, excuse me. Um, Pidge, what were you saying about Matt the other day?”

At the mention of her brother, Pidge straightens up and crosses the room to fiddle with the navigations. She whips the map through a galaxy or two before settling on a three-planet system orbiting a red sun “Coran and I were talking about the style of Matt’s helmet. I’ve been cross-referencing the helmets with the armour database I downloaded on Sparnel. It’s got elements of the helmets the war moon of this planet,” she gestures to the lumpy planet which is the closest to the sun “and to the masks the inhabitants of this planet,” she gestures to the thrice-ringed planet furthest from the star “wear to filter out noxious gases from the volcanic vents that made this atmosphere. This planet only got terraformed last year. That means Matt has been near here, or in contact with someone near this planet within the last twelve months. That’s the strongest lead I have right now. There’s not much going on there strategically…but we could always take down the war moon while we’re out there. Give the Galra foot soldiers a few less laser guns to point at us.”

Allura and Shiro exchange a weighted glance. They have already had this argument in the relative privacy afforded by being unable to sleep through a full night. While the rest of the team are knocked out in their beds, Allura and Shiro have arguments in under-tones about how fruitful it is to allow Pidge to continue her crusade.   
Yes, Shiro misses Matt and worries for him too, but they have the Galra on the run right now. But Allura thinks it is worth pursuing him, even if only through a series of small raids and detours in between the bigger liberations. Matt could link them to that group of freedom fighters he has been spotted with. Pidge deserves the chance to find her family. This and a number of other points have been traded in regular volleys. Once their talk grew so heated Lance walked into the common room, told them they sounded like his parents trying to do taxes, and made them go back to their rooms to finish the discussion with cooler heads.

While Allura and Shiro are locked in a silent battle of wills, Keith interjects “Sure. We just finished a planetary liberation. The lions need a break. This should be easier.”

“Gas planet. Great. Let’s cross our fingers that his royal Highness doesn’t show up.”

“I wouldn’t worry about that,” Coran smiles at Lance and points to a planet at the edge of the map “Last time we heard from him, he was all the way over there and moving off in the opposite direction of the way we want to go.”

“Frankly, I’m surprised he didn’t show up here to fight us during the liberation.” puts in Hunk “Thank God for small mercies, like Mom always says.”

Pidge takes Keith by the elbow and begins to tug him towards the training room “My mother says God is the collective delusion of the ill and insane. But she still wears a cross. She also says it’s better safe than sorry, so I don’t know what’s going on with her spirituality.”

“I need a nap!” announces Lance “Shiro, you’re not gonna admit it, but you do too.”

“I’m fine.” Shiro says too quickly.

“Take a nap!” shouts Keith.

“I really think you should lay down for a few moments.” says Coran in a more soothing tone. 

“Really, before you collapse on the bridge.” says Allura. In truth, she would like to get Shiro off the bridge so she can set a course for Pidge’s war moon without him hemming and hawing in her ear, making her doubt the team’s choice. Shiro has been doing that a lot since he got back. She can’t tell if it is an unconscious or a deliberate thing. Maybe he has always been like this, but since he returned she has been more acutely aware of his behaviour and moods. 

Seeing he is outnumbered, Shiro raises his hands in surrender “Alright, alright. You’ve got me in a corner. A nap corner. I’ll go lay down on the couch. You guys feel free to come and make sure I’m actually sleeping.”

“I will!” calls Keith from the depths of the hall.

“I’ll set a course for the war moon. Hunk, why don’t you help me navigate? I might actually teach you the castle defence system while you’re up and about.”

Coran and Hunk bend over the controls together. Shiro takes his leave, and Allura drops tiredly onto the stairs. She stares out at the waving plain of grass and the jagged mountains in the distance. This planet will remain beautiful, thanks to Voltron’s efforts. The Galra empire’s machinery will not tear it open and in half, the way it has done with so many planets in Voltron’s absence. For some reason this realisation does not make Allura as happy as it normally does. She cannot shake the feeling something, someone, is staring back at her. Perhaps outside. Perhaps down from the sky, or up through the crust of this planet. Another planet.

Someone has trained their eyes upon her and is approaching slowly but steadily, with cruelty and mocking on their inscrutable face. Allura does not know who it is. Only that they are coming. For her. For Voltron. And she can do nothing to stop their progress.

 

 

 

(A couple of galaxies over, in the belly of a Weblum)

“Just for the record,” says Shiro “I hate everyone in this Weblum.”

“I’m not too fond of you at the moment!” snaps Thace from somewhere beneath him.

“What did I do?” protests Slav, far overhead.


	2. “Slav, I have two PhDs. I’m not gonna die by blowing up a pocket of dead alien gas, alright?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Coming up with alien words and names is either a project of careful research, or pulling nonsense words off the top of your head. Guess which one I picked.

The Weblum was Thace’s idea. While in prison, he heard plenty of gossip passing between the guards, including that Weblum were being harvested all over the empire to supply a large teludav under construction near the ruins of Daibazaal. Ideally the closer Shiro can get to the floating heart of the Galra empire the closer he will get to Voltron or, at least, the easier it will be to reach Voltron the next time he rears his shiny head. It is impossible to imagine Zarkon would want such an enormous project to go unsupervised by himself or one of his higher officers. If they are extremely lucky, Zarkon will be there himself. If they are not, it will be Haggar or one of Lotor’s generals. In the end it does not matter who Shiro finds there, as long as they have some kind of authority.  
Shiro also means to do as much damage as he possibly can on his way back to Voltron. The death of any higher-up will destabilise the empire. If he fails as an assassin, then he can always liberate a couple of greenhouse moons, destroy a war-moon, maybe even give this new prince a swift kick in the head for the way he is apparently pestering the hell out of Voltron in Shiro’s absence.

But first he has to get out of this Weblum, and it would be nice if he could do it with Thace and Slav in tow.

(About a month and a half earlier)

Later he would learn the moon’s name was Nalquor, the sole moon of a long-silent Nalquod, and firmly lodged in a belt of meteorites that had caused the planet’s apocalypse some thousands of years ago. Shiro’s nurse told him the story while he lay in his sickbed, coming in and out of consciousness. A sad history whispered through a thick fever.

“…the Blue Paladin’s original home is beneath us. You must have known, somehow. You were meant to be here. We will care for you until you can tell us why.”

The voice of the person that tended to his wounds- and God, were there a lot- they were rough and clammy. It reminded him of the time a shark pup bumped him in the surf of the beach where Keith learned to swim. Hesitant, alarming, but it was somehow a comfort to know, for once, what was in the water with him.  
Most of what he saw for the first few days was the low roof of a cloth tent. Once he caught a glimpse of the fin-fringed face of his care-taker. He grasped their hand and squeezed it in thanks. They gave him something that might have been their version of a smile. 

“Nalquod used to be a thriving planet. The first Blue Paladin came from it. He came back home after the war with a Galra husband, as the stories go. They lived in peace for many years even as the Tyrant Emperor spread across the universe. The Blue Paladin had been wounded in Voltron’s final battle. There was nothing he could do, after hiding the Blue Lion. He and his husband lived in silence and peace for many years until Zarkon came…”

Shiro does not know what they are feeding him. The drink is just water. Water is the same across the universe. What they are feeding him is small and cube-shaped. His nurse lifts his head, pushes the cube past his lips and it melts the moment it touches the back of his throat. The taste is somewhere between mango flesh and the metallic taste that fills the mouth during a nosebleed. Whatever it is, the food is bringing his strength back to him little by little.

“…surrounded the planet with a belt of asteroids held in by a trick of magnetism. If the Blue Paladin and his people objected to what was happening at large in the universe, then Zarkon would send an asteroid to crush one of the cities beneath the water. They did nothing. But Zarkon punished the Blue Paladin anyway. Zarkon could not allow him to continue to exist. First, he crushed the smallest cities…”

For the few moments he is lucid each day he asks after the others. First, he calls him his team. Then when he isn’t given a satisfactory answer, he asks for his family. Some scrap of intelligence of sense remaining to him keeps him from asking for them by name. The more anonymous the Paladins of Voltron can be outside of their armour and lions, the better.  
But the temptation is strong. A couple of times he is absolutely convinced Lance is just in the next room, reading aloud from a manual for Hunk, and he has only to call out for either one of them to be reunited with his team. Now and again, when he is conscious of being in a bed, he also believes his brother is beside him. Keith lays with his back to Shiro, his knees tucked into his chest, the tough pads of his heels pressing into Shiro’s leg, and a stray strand of his hair creeping up Shiro’s nose. Keith will be there, if only he can find the strength to turn his head to the side.

Only once does he say a name aloud, when fever dream convinces him Pidge has walked into the room.  
“Pidge? How long have I been out?”

She smiles. But her mouth remains closed, and she will not take his hand for when he reaches for her.

“…and the people could not come to the surface for fear of being struck down by Galra troops. So they remained beneath the water and suffered through the siege from the sky. By the time Zarkon and his troops moved on each large city and population hub had been destroyed. Those who survived came to this moon. Some moved on to other planets similar. But the ancestors of my ancestors chose to live on this moon. We are the jewel in the belt that killed the first world.”

 

“Interestingly, in 0.05% of the realities in which we are in this situation the Weblum turns out to be alive after all. The Galra cruiser that’s towing it is destroyed and we are all forcibly ejected into the vacuum of space. Only Thace survives.”

“Death sounds good right about now.” mumbles Shiro to himself.

“Slav, don’t start with that again.” says Thace “I know you’re trying to help, or cope, or both, but it makes Shiro rabid.”

Shiro rankles “You say it like I’m the only one who has a problem with it!”

“You’re the only one who’s tried to stuff Slav in an airlock.” Thace shoots back.

“I keep telling you I wasn’t trying to kill him! I got in there with him- I was hiding, you nerd! Not all of us can dangle off ceilings by our fingernails! Do you see claws on me? Do I look like a space cat to you?” Shiro stops, inhaling deeply, and imagines himself in his happy place. At the moment, anywhere but in the slowly festering gut of a dead Weblum. “Alright, alright, let’s stop this. Thace, I’m gonna try coming down to you”

The three of them are spread out over what must be a quarter of a kilometre on the interior wall of the Weblum. Getting into this thing involved diving into its throat. To keep the scaultrite from rocketing out into space from a pressure change, the mouth was vacuum sealed with an over-sized version of the breathing masks Thace and Slav are wearing. The helmet of Shiro’s paladin armour was sufficient to protect him. They each ended up hitching a ride into the Weblum in a different way; Thace dressed as one of the guards patrolling the Weblum for hiding rebels (the guards judged the Weblum empty) and jumped over when eyes were off him, Shiro sneaked in past the teeth, and Slav clung to the bottom of the Galra guards’ transport because he thought it would be less dangerous than climbing in, which makes no sense to Shiro.  
They got in without issue. The problem now is reuniting and finding a comfortable place to ride out the journey.

“Don’t use your jet-pack!” shouts Slav “This Weblum is full of gases from decay. You might catch a pocket of methane.”

“Slav, I have two PhDs. I’m not gonna die by blowing up a pocket of dead alien gas, alright?” snaps Shiro with far more conviction than he really feels. After all that has happened to him since Kerebos blowing himself up by inadvertently igniting a pocket of dead-flesh fart might be one of the easier ways to go out.

This is not the first time Shiro has had to scale something precarious without a harness or rope for support. A lot of his late teenage years were spent going up huge trees to retrieve Keith- the fire department stopped coming to their house after the twelfth time their mother called. They figured this crazy woman was putting Keith at the top of the tree then phoning it in for attention. How else would a kindergartener get up a tree so often? So retrieval duty fell to Shiro. Honestly, finding out Keith is half Galra explains an awful lot of weird things that happened while he was growing up.  
The Weblum flesh yields far more than tree bark. It is an easy matter to find handholds and footholds even though he is going down and has to feel his way down. Two days dead, the Weblum’s flesh is still as fresh as if it were still throbbing with life in spite of the gases that are actually visibly condensing towards the centre of its vast insides. Even super space bacteria take a long time to break down something this massive.

Every now and then Thace calls out to him to help Shiro pinpoint where to go. About halfway through the trip down Shiro almost loses his grip when Slav unexpectedly scurries past him, every single one of his many hands flying furiously. But he catches himself, and when he can breathe again, continues irrevocably down.

 

 

On the afternoon of the eighth day of his convalescence, Shiro sits up and rubs the sleep from his eyes. He pushes aside the soft sheets of kelp-like material that have been serving as his bedding and touches his feet to a floor of spongey grass. All around him are the sparse walls of a blue tent, apparently made of the same kelp stuff that his bedding is.   
The walls are close and there are no furnishings apart from the platform he has slept on and a small chest he takes to be storage for medicines and bandages. Must be an infirmary. Either this is a very small or personal settlement, or the fact that he is a Paladin was enough to compel them to stick him somewhere more private. Shiro looks down at himself and is pleased to see he has been bandaged and bathed. Beats having to cauterize his own wounds with his Galra hand. He is also dressed, which is nice. Whatever these people count as genitalia roughly match up to what Shiro considers impolite to display on public; they have put him in a long skirt-like thing that reaches his ankles, knotted about his waist.

Shiro pushes at the walls of the tent until a piece gives way into the outside. Hopefully he did not just break the tent. A breath of balmy, salty air pushes his hair back and sends a chill across his bare skin. His tent is on the edge of a cliff. He looks from side to side and sees a scattering of dwellings lining the cliffs on either side. The people are a variety of reds in skin colour, very tall, very long-limbed and covered in fins. Facial fins, fins on the arm, fins on the chin, fins on the legs which are facing backwards. All of them are wearing shorter or longer versions of his skirt. He does not recognise his nurse among them.

Gathering his courage, Shiro walks from the tent and waves down one of the taller figures, which he takes to be an adult “Um, hi.”

The figure beams “You are awake.”

“I am. So…can I speak to the person who cleaned me up? I’d like to thank them. I’m also not that clear on what happened.”

“Of course. I will make your friend aware that you are awake. He has been very worried about you.”

Shiro’s mind jumps immediately to Keith. But ‘friend’? Wouldn’t Keith call him his brother? That must mean he dragged Lance and Hunk with him, when he did whatever it was he did, or that these aliens don’t recognise human gender binary enough to recognise Pidge as a female. Maybe even Coran? But then a terrible, terrible thought comes to him.

“Slav?” he says weakly, praying to whatever deities might be listening to him that it is not truth.

“Yes, your friend, Slav.”

Shiro has the urge to sink to the floor and bury his face in the strange spongey grass. Why did it have to be Slav? Why couldn’t he be shanghaied on his own? Why did he ever let the team rescue that insufferable ferret-centipede from his space jail when Shiro could have let him languish, albeit tortured, and remain blissfully unaware of the suffering Slav could inflict upon him?

“Come.” the alien puts a fingerless, flipped-shaped hand on his shoulder “I will take you to him.”

 

Thace hangs casually off the Weblum by his Marmora dagger. He looks more bat than cat right now. Shiro imagines what it would be like to spelunk, look up and see all seven feet of Thace hanging off the cave wall by his dagger. Instant heart-attack. Slav is tugs at the straps of his breathing mask with two hands, the others latched firmly to the flesh wall. He nods to Shiro as he carefully lowers himself between them and catches his breath.

“The patrol passed a ship on the way in. It’s not that far. Can you make it?”

Shiro nods “I’m fine.”

“Clearly you are not, but alright, whatever you say.”

Shiro fixes Thace with a stink-eye “Thace, I’m fine.”

“Alright, I’m glad you feel confident enough in your own strength to say that. Because I don’t. I feel like I was flung repeatedly into several suns. I don’t know what’s holding you together, Shiro, whether humans are naturally this Willow-damned determined to push their bodies and minds to the breaking point, or if you’re a special case, but I can’t keep up with you. I need to rest.”

Shiro is about to apologise, but before he can get even the beginnings of it out Slav has peeled Thace off the Weblum wall and slung him sack-like over his topmost shoulder with a cheerful “Why didn’t you say so! Point me the way and we’ll have you napping in no time!”

Thace is too exhausted to complain of the slight against his dignity “Hang a left past that disgusting pustule.”

And off Slav scurries, leaving Shiro to catch up in his own time.

 

Slav is wearing something that reminds Shiro of the slinky dress his senior prom date wore, except there are a multitude of short arms sticking out of a bunch of sleeves. He stands amongst a crowd of the aliens, animated and gesticulating at the sky.

When he lays eyes on Shiro, the relief on his face is almost enough that Shiro is glad to see him “Shiro! I was just telling the Nalise about the possibility that you were going to die. It was a very low percentage- it only happens in 15% of realities. But you have been very lucky, I understand. These good people assigned their best healer to you. This is Nalquioria.”

“I’m glad to see you are up again.”

Shiro recognises the voice. The face, too. Nalquioria advances and, weirdly, gives him a hug. Strange how some gestures are universal. At least, he assumes this means that they are glad to see him, and not a proposal, or marking Shiro as their next piece of prey, so he hugs them back.

“Thank you.”

“Do not thank me. We should be thanking you and Voltron. You are a Paladin, as Slav told us.”

“In 96% of universes!” puts in Slav “In the other 4% Shiro is usually a freedom fighter. There is only one universe, I have calculated, where Shiro is far distant from the war, perhaps as a scientist on his home world.”

Barista, thinks Shiro, or a stripper. I am either a barista or a stripped and there are no other options. God, I hope I’m not a stripper, the heels would murder my posture. 

He turns to Slav “Please tell me you remember what happened.”

And Slav does. In small words; in spite of the two PhDs under his belt, Shiro’s brain is completely fried. He can hardly walk himself through the idea that he is somewhere other than Boss Ma’am, let alone deduce how he has gotten here.  
Teleportation, says Slav, saved them from Zarkon. He imagines Boss Ma’am activated a latent ability that sling-shot the two of them from the cockpit in the instant of Zarkon’s attack. Still, Shiro bore the brunt of what must have been the most powerful blows in the universe and it floored him for this planet’s equivalent of eight days. Privately Shiro wonders if he did not come close to shutting down entirely. The amount of stress his body and mind have gone through in the last two or so years would have probably killed most people. But Shiro is used to bullying himself through the worst of times. He had been taking care of himself and Keith long before turning eighteen and leaving their home-town for the promises of a bigger city, of a scholarship at the Garrison HQ. Being launched into an intergalactic gladiator ring was no less terrifying than competing for that scholarship. Being charged by a nameless monster sourced from the darkest reaches of the old, dead systems was only slightly scarier than explaining Keith’s behaviour to a PTA stuffed with angry middle-aged professionals, wanting to know why his brother thinks it is alright to not only bring an antique knife to school but use it to open his yoghurt cup at recess.

Been there, done that, got the scars to prove it.

Slav had not been able to get any word to Voltron since they disappeared. The society on Nalquod is hardly rustic, but it is smack in the middle of Galra territory. The dead planet below is frequently harvested for ores and the tissue of some of the hardier animal species that survived the asteroid onslaught, to the point that the empire keeps several ports on the moon. The nearest port is, by Slav’s calculations, less than twenty kilometres away as the space-crow flies. Taking Shiro and Slav in was an enormous risk. Each and every member of the village stands to pay for it, should Shiro be discovered.

“They send a patrol through each week,” says a person Nalquioria identifies as her spawn, Nalquornan, which Shiro understands to mean her child “Since we’re so close to the port they can’t risk us hiding subversive materials or someone from Marmora. We’ve already had to hide you once.”

This explains the vague impression Shiro has of being briefly stuffed into a tight, dark crawl-space and being told to hold his breath “We won’t burden your community much longer.”

“A burden?” one of the elders of the village, Nalqun, scoffs “You think it is a burden to do our part for Voltron. We know what your team have done for the universe. We know what you plan to do to the empire. Nothing gives us more pleasure than knowing we have struck back against the Tyrant, no matter how small the blow.”

Nalquioria interjects “The old worlds are abuzz. There are rumours of an uprising in Rygnirath’s Galra slums. The Dalterion Belt’s sisterhood of moons is said to be pledging support to Voltron any day. Nalquwerin here was just visiting a spawn on Rygnirath. The Altean slums were absolutely alive with excitement and they say all of them are like that, across the galaxy.”

“Altean slums?” repeats Shiro slowly.

 

The wrecked ship turns out to be a larger, spikier version of the escape pods at the Castle of Lions. A sickening feeling of homesickness consumes Shiro from head to toe as he lays on his back underneath the cracked dome of the windshield. Thace is curled up in a ball at the back of the ship’s bridge, dead to the worlds. Acting on some kind of herding instinct Slav coiled up and piled himself on top of Thace- who offered no protest, but rather, accepted this as if it was the only way to sleep. Again, this may explain why Keith used to sleep on Shiro’s chest until puberty caught up with him and made it so that he ran the risk of suffocating Shiro in his sleep.  
Shiro only hopes that his companions do not expect him to curl up into a ball and take a snooze on Slav. He’ll stay on the other end of the ship where he can sprawl and kick and have his nightmares in what little privacy the distance of a couple of metres affords him. 

His thoughts inevitably drift to Voltron. Keith has been in charge for nearly two months, which must have been an absolute shit-show for him. Add the pressure of leading Voltron on top of the trauma of losing his brother for the second goddamned time in as many years and Shiro wonders if it might not have been better to instruct the team to stick Keith in a straitjacket until he reappears.   
When he told Keith he was the leader in the event of something happening to him Shiro assumed he would be dead. The way these last two years have gone it seems a miracle to Shiro even now that he is not a jumble of chewed bones in the den of some alien monster. Death is unavoidable. Probably breathing down the back of his neck. He assumed he would be eaten, or shot, or stabbed, or electrocuted, or blown to smithereens, or sucked out of an airlock without his helmet, or killed by Zarkon, or snapped in half by a robot, or get shot down in Boss Ma’am or perhaps if the universe was feeling very cruel, fatally stabbed by Keith in a training session. 

Whatever happened to him, Shiro definitely expected to leave a body. Maybe a dismembered limb. A bloody trail leading to the mouth of a fat, satisfied predator. Something to indicate that Shirogane Takeshi was completely and irreversibly dead and that everyone should move on without him. Keith gets closure, mourns him, and grows to be a great leader with the support of the rest of the team. The Galra empire is toppled. Pidge gets her family back, Lance goes home to his ocean, Hunk gets to hug his moms again, Allura becomes one of the delegates of some kind of space UN, Coran gets the rest he deserves and Keith grows his mullet out into a samurai-style ponytail.   
But no. Instead Boss Ma’am had to fire Shiro’s sorry ass into the void of space with no apparent goal or care where he ended up- just that he get the hell out- and gave him a neurotic, seven-foot ferret man for company.

Voltron is still functioning. Three weeks after Shiro disappeared, they somehow got him working again by swapping lions around, meaning Keith is now in Boss Ma’am and runs the risk of being forcibly ejected from his cockpit. How Voltron intends to fight with Lance acting as the sword arm, Shiro has no idea. He has seen Lance jab himself in the face with a space-spork many times because he was too distracted by a conversation to feed himself properly. Allura as a leg is going to be awkward. She and Hunk have only known each other for five months. Lance and Hunk were able to make Voltron’s limp, owing to the different size of the legs, work, because they have been friends long enough to learn to accommodate each other’s differences quite smoothly. But she is smart and perceptive. Allura will work it out.  
Hunk should be fine. He has the emotional durability of tempered steel. Pidge, Shiro would worry about, except that there’s that fake Shiro strutting around the castle and presumably fulfilling the role of pseudo older-brother. Shiro tries not to think about it. The good thing is that his replacement is not currently piloting a lion. Voltron will keep moving and fighting and pushing back against the empire. The kids, Shiro hopes, will take care of themselves.

At last, Shiro closes his eyes. But he knows sleep will not come to him for a while yet. The screams of the Nalise are still fresh in his ears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And so begins the parallel adventure: Cat Dad, Space Dad and Uncle Ferret are on a road trip


	3. “It started out as a training. Now I think it’s performance art.”

Lance has committed his seventh murder of the day and it has barely reached noon. 

He removes the tip of the red bayard from Shiro’s throat and offers him a hand up “I think the only reason I’m beating you is because you’re still half dead.”

Shiro grins at him with naked pride “I think you’re dodging around the fact that you’re damn good at this. I’ve never seen anyone pick up sword-fighting so fast. It’s a little scary, actually.”

“I have a theory about that!” calls Pidge from the corner of the room.  
When she heard Lance and Shiro were going to while away the hours of the trip to the war moon by sparring, she dragged half a dozen screens and twice as many extension cords into a comfortable corner so she could work and jeer at the same time. 

“I’m telling you, we’re swapping skills over our bonds with our respective lions. When we form Voltron, we’re like one big open wound trading bacteria and blood. The lions give us some of our skills and they arranged it so we can augment each other. How else do you explain the way Hunk was a sterling pilot the second he touched Kitty’s dashboard? And me? I’m not a pilot. I’m a hacker. I shouldn’t even know what the brakes look like. It’s the only explanation.”

“Pidge used to talk like this about hurricanes and chem trails at the Garrison.” Lance mutters to Shiro.

“I heard that! And it is true, Lance, which you would know if you read any of the material I passed onto you-”

“Hey, I read that compendium of Mothman sightings for you. I couldn’t drop my all my assignments and simulator hours every time you found a blurry picture of La Llorona in some New Mexico barrio, ok?”

Deciding that now would be a good time to teach Lance the basics of avoiding a sneak-attack, Shiro slams all of his weight into him. Lance goes down with an indignant squawk and twists himself out of the way just in time to avoid being Shiro’s mattress, though his legs are pinned under Shiro’s torso.

“¡Qué pesado!” Lance whacks him with the flat of the blade “Get off!”

“You think Lotor will let you go because you ask him nicely?” Shiro raises his own weapon (a training sword he found while trying to take a nap in one of the storage closets) and swings for Lance’s throat.

Lance parries easily. The top half of him is heroic and serious with the sword in hand. The bottom half of him is doing that typical younger-sibling move of pedalling his feet into Shiro’s ribs as fast as he can in an attempt to get him off. It’s a clumsy and sometimes disorientating style of fighting; one moment Lance handles his sword or rifle with all the confidence of a man who has been training for intergalactic war his entire life, and the next he is bites his opponent’s arm and administers a devastating pinch at the same time. Shiro enjoys watching Lance fight immensely- it’s kind of like watching someone act out free-form jazz. 

Unable to withstand the flurry of blows, Shiro rolls away to safety. He gets to his feet quicker than Lance and takes advantage of his head start by whacking Lance back- this time right on the ass.

“Jesus!”

“Your rear is open!” cries Shiro.

“I can’t believe I don’t have a camera.” Pidge says breathlessly, wiping tears from underneath her glasses.

Now Shiro and Lance circle each other. The distance is beyond arm’s reach, unless Shiro wants to lunge and risk getting stabbed in the face, sheathed sword or not. This puts Lance’s butt safely out of the way of another attack.

“I gotta ask, Shiro,” Lance says through heavy breaths “Why do you go straight for whacking or stabbing the butt? Aren’t you supposed to be a grown-ass man?”

“Lance, just because I’m twenty-six doesn’t mean my sense of humour is any older than six.” Shiro blows a strand of hair out of his eyes.

At first it was a controversial decision, keeping his hair long. Pidge apparently didn’t care either way- so long as he promised to get rid of the beard. Hunk said it looked unnatural not to have a lone white tuft sticking out on the top of his head, while Lance said he would be more than happy to say goodbye to what he called a quarter of an undercut. It meant more braiding material for him. Allura was still not quite sold on the idea of braids- apparently only humans and Altean mice had a concept of braiding, and the rest of the galaxy either put long hair in a bun or let it free in the wind. Coran was eager for a long-haired Paladin. In part, Shiro thinks, because Coran has a hard time telling which human is which when they are out of their armour. Allura once confided in him that Alteans use smell to distinguish one another more than sight, and with humans it was mostly a confusing mess of colours and meaningless scents.  
Ultimately, Keith in the deciding vote.

“If you keep it long,” he said to Shiro some three days after picking him up in Boss Ma’am “Lance might get distracted by your hair and stop making fun of me.”

Even though Shiro was at that point still hooked into an IV and felt like he had been microwaved several times with his plastic packaging still on, he laughed, hard “For you, little man, anything.”

So now he’s fighting with a bun. Shiro has not had long hair before and the experience of being frightened by a stray wisp of hair in the corner of his eye is still so fresh and new each time, and especially distracting in battle.  
But that hasn’t stopped him from giving as good as he gets from Lance.

In the same instant, they lunge for each other. Concentration goes out the window as the two men roll around the training room floor.

Hunk picks this moment to poke his head through the door “Coran says we should start getting ready for the war-moon…what are they doing?” he directs this at Pidge, doubting that Lance or Shiro could hear him over their screeches.

“It started out as a training. Now I think it’s performance art.”

To Pidge’s protestations, Hunk goes over and separates the battle. He puts Shiro carefully on his feet. Lance, he slings over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.

“Getting any better?”

Shiro nods “Lance is really getting formidable. I haven’t seen anyone pick up sword fighting this fast.”

“If you make a Zorro joke,” Lance says near the small of Hunk’s back “I’m gonna kick the white out of your hair.”

At once, an enormous blast shakes the castle. The boys are all thrown flat. Safe in her corner, Pidge holds her screens upright, her teeth chattering violently from the reverberations. A sound of distant thunder tells her they have been knocked out of warp. No telling where they might be now. But she knows who attacked them. Only one weapon is capable of blasting an Altean war-castle out of mid-warp.

“What the hell was that?” Lance picks himself up and heads for the stairs.

“Oh, Jesus, I hope that wasn’t the boiler.” Hunk decides Lance is not moving fast enough and scoops him up again.

Shiro helps Pidge up “Are you alright?”

“Yeah. We better get ready for a fight.”

Allura stands on the bridge in her Paladin armour, probably making the colour pink look more menacing than it ever has before. Her brow is furrowed into worry lines that are by now well-worn and familiar. The glow of the controls bathes her face in harsh white light, so that her skin appears cracked and washed-out like old clay.

Lance slings an arm over her shoulder and squints at the coms “Is it Prince Shampoo and his merry band again?”

“I don’t know how he keeps finding us,” she mutters angrily “But he blasted us right out of warp. Do you know how hard that is? To hit an object warping by teludav? That’s like hitting a speeding comet with another speeding comet while blinded and riding a rabid Yupper.”

“I have a theory.” say Pidge and Shiro in unison. They look at each other.

“About trans-dimensional material?” prompts Shiro.

Pidge nods “And how they’re attracted to each other?”

“Because trans-dimensional material follows its own law? The laws of attraction are flipped, so like attracts like and unlike attracts unlike.” 

Pidge is excited now, rocking on her heels “Because trans-dimensional material is by its very nature in defiance of the universal laws of physics and logic!”

“And trans-dimensional material doesn’t give a dang about how many rules it breaks.” finishes Shiro.

Allura looks up irritably and opens a feed to the exterior of the castle “If you two can figure out how to make that work for us, the way Lotor’s got it working for him, I’ll be very grateful.”

Pidge pushes under Lance’s arm for a better view of the feed “What’ll you give me?”

“I’ll give you a grape.” says Allura.

The sleek shape of Lotor’s craft springs out against the stars. 

“A single grape?”

“And a pat on the back.”

“Great, I’ve worked harder for less.”

Keith tromps into the room with Coran in tow, already armoured and raring to go. He tosses Hunk’s helmet at him “Sorry, I was using this to hold my door open. The damn hydraulic busted again. I’d use my own, but my helmet doesn’t make a gap big enough for me to get in and out.”

Hunk catches it “No problem buddy. I’ll see if I can fix your door when we’re finished with Prince Hair Commercial.”

Coran has collected the rest and passes them out “Pidge, Lance, Allura- Princess, please wear yours this time.”

“Lotor already knows what I look like.” she sets her helmet on the controls “What’s the point in wearing this?”

“Well there’s no need to refresh his memory, is there?”

Allura jams her helmet on “I suppose you have a point.”

Technically, Lotor knows what most of the team look like. The darkened visors of their helmets afford a certain amount of anonymity, but Lotor favours blows to the head and knocks helmets off when he can. Shiro’s face has been seen everybody who tuned into the Gladiator feed in the last two years. At this point concealing his face would be like putting a band-aid over a crack in a dam. Until she got into Guapa, Allura never wore a helmet into battle. So in theory every soldier of the empire she has ever punched has a vivid memory of her livid face, seconds before the world went black and they woke up with fragments of teeth in their mouth.  
The last time Voltron and Lotor crossed swords he also managed to wallop Pidge’s helmet off her. They are not sure whether Lotor got a good look at her face, though, because approximately two seconds after he swatted Pidge’s helmet off Hunk body-slammed him through a wall. The disorientation of being crushed through a wall by 220 pounds of angry Paladin may well have been enough to blot Pidge’s face from Lotor’s mind. 

But Lance, Keith and Coran are still stubborn mysteries. Outside of the growing number in the Coalition, not that many are aware Coran even exists. According to Kolivan most of the empire thinks the castle is run by an artificially intelligent autopilot or that Allura herself works behind the particle barrier. Lotor has only ever known Keith to be in the cockpit of Boss Ma’am. Whatever reason he assigns to Shiro’s reappearance in the team but absence in the cockpit, he keeps to himself.  
He is similarly unperturbed by Coran’s existence and rarely refers to him, let alone addresses him. This suits Coran fine. Generally, when Lotor hails the castle for the traditional bit of villainous monologuing, Coran is off-screen preparing the nastiest attacks he can thinks of for “that self-satisfied flarp-bugle”.

Voltron scatters to get dressed and prepared for the in-coming battle.

Meanwhile, over in Lotor’s craft, there is a problem with the coms system.

There are a lot of problems over in Lotor’s craft. Least of all is the speed with which it was built, and the design specs. When the empire’s technicians heard the Prince’s trans-dimensional craft needed to be constructed with the utmost speed, they designed the thing in less than an earth-week. Comfort was sacrificed for proficiency. Proficiency was sacrificed for speed- only the most lightweight instruments could be included in the craft and risk not damaging its speed, so almost all of the wiring, instrumentation and gears are made out of Valurian paper-crystal, which every engineer knows is a nightmare to calibrate and maintain. A single digit off in the calibration might cause another hardier machine to stall. In this craft, which the generals swiftly nicknamed Borf after the Galra god of disease and death, a single digit off in the calibration means that up is now down, left is right, forwards is backwards, and the quality of the coms is like shouting at the top of a well to someone at the bottom, with a swarm of angry space-bees swarming between you.

The engineers also assumed that Lotor would be driving Borf. The majority of the empire likes to pretend Lotor did not put four half-Galra females in positions of extreme power, and the engineers did, placing only two passenger seats in the cockpit, apart from the driver’s seat and the shotgun. Why would Lotor need more than two passengers? After all, Borf was made for speed and fire-power, not as a space-taxi.  
Back in port the generals drew straws to decide which of them would be sitting in Zethrid’s lap. Narti came out short this time, so she sits tall and proud on Zethrid’s knee, poised for combat. Kova has made himself comfortable on Lotor’s lap, knowing full well that Lotor hates him and has declared him to be the most obnoxious creature in the universe, right after the current Red Paladin. 

While the Altean castle looms against the silhouette of a supernova, Lotor tries to persuade the coms to work again. Lotor’s strategy, as it is with most if not all technological problems, is to whack the dashboard “Damn this infirm kylgarg! I recalibrated it just before we left, and it’s already having problems again.”

“Probably because you beat it up so much!” chirps Ezor from the seat behind him. Her long arms reach around Lotor’s waist for the dashboard “Let me see if I can-”

“Will you stop doing that with your arms! It honestly is like being groped, I swear-”

“…pay for inciting rebellion on No’orokel and cutting the empire off from our source of Tronor farmers!” Zethrid is saying to Narti “I’ll snap the Black Paladin’s tiny ape spine over my knee. Then I’ll beat the rest of Voltron with his corpse! I’ll capture the Green and train her as a minion, then set her on her own team…”

Narti nods along sympathetically. Zethrid is upset because Tronor steak was her favourite thing to eat, and she claimed it was good for adding muscle mass. Now she will have to go back to plain old Terran moo steak like some common office worker.

Acxa should know better than to ask for quiet in the cockpit, but she tries anyway “That is an Altean war-castle in front of us you know. It would be nice to get some peace to centre myself before I steer us into war with this thing-”

“- we’re on the wrong frequency to hail anyway.”

“I have eyes, Ezor- no offence Narti. Just fix it without feeling me up-”

“- hollow the Yellow’s skull out and use it as a bookend-”

“-wasn’t trained to fly with people screaming in my face, is all I’m saying-”

“-the circuit needs to be replaced after today. Stupid paper-crystal wiring-”

“Ezor, get your joints out of my ribs.”

“-and only then, after Champion has seen her precious Voltron suffer and die, will I let Borf take her to sweet oblivion.”

“…too much to ask for apparently-”

“Got it!” cries Ezor, cutting across the rest of the babble.

A feed flares to life over the dashboard as the paper-crystal groans to life, at last hailing the castle. The Paladins are greeted by the sight of their current mortal enemies crushed into what amounts to about three bus seats’ worth of space. Lotor’s hair is flops fantastically in every direction, much of it tangled up in Ezor’s hands and Kova’s paws. Acxa has still got her mouth open in a shout that cuts off into a squeak as she tries to recover her dignity. Zethrid’s rage has put just the tiniest frosting of froth in the corners of her mouth. Only Narti looks even mildly intimidating; a fox with blood on its muzzle among a gaggle of honking geese.

An awkward silence stretches between the two ships. His grin hidden safely behind his helmet, Lance wonders why they are fighting these people instead of going out for coffee.

As usual, Lance is the first to break the silence. He raises a hand “Prince Lootle! ¿Qué pasa?”

Lotor’s face twitches “It’s Lotor.”

“That’s what I said, Lootoot. Got some hair in your ears?”

Lance has quickly become the Paladin Lotor longs to murder the most. It comes from being the middle child of seven- an innate ability to annoy. To worm one’s way under even the thickest skin and grow more irritating with each second that passes. Having been an only child with few friends, Lotor has no idea why Lance annoys him so much. He is not capable of recognising the special techniques a sibling uses to drive a contemporary to insanity, so has chalked Lance’s ability up to some kind of human mind-control; a lesser version of what Narti does when she manipulates actions and thoughts.

Keith steps in before Lance can make it a full-on pissing match “You knocked us out of warp just now.”

“Yes, we did,” Lotor untangles a lock of hair from Kova’s flailing paws “For a fight, obviously. To the death. Voltron dies today- Narti, control your animal.”

Kova has begun to climb up Lotor’s front. Narti reaches around him and snags her cat from his shirt, but Kova’s claws are snagged so Lotor is nearly stripped half-naked in front of Voltron.

“That particle barrier won’t save you forever,” says Lotor through the fabric of his shirt. He tugs the collar back over his head, his hair more mussed than ever “In fact, I daresay it won’t even save you today.”

“Evasive manoeuvres?” suggests Coran.

Keith and Allura exchange a glance.

“Not yet.” he says.

Shiro puts an arm around Keith’s shoulder “What do you think? Do we run?”

“We wait and see what he’s got.”

They say this in Japanese. Acxa gives them a quizzical look. Apparently, the translation matrix from Voltron either only translates English or doesn’t allow aliens to understand what Voltron does not want them to understand. 

Zethrid lunges forwards to scream at the feed “YOU’LL PAY FOR WHAT YOU DID TO NO’ORKEL!”  
Spit flecks the monitor.

Plugging one ear, Lotor says “Fire.”

The castle misses the brunt of the impact thanks to Coran. He steers the castle just a few metres to the left the moment Lotor opens his mouth. A mighty bolt of purplish energy punches a hole through the upper part of the particle barrier and narrowly grazes the outermost turret. The lights dim and flicker briefly. A siren starts to wail towards the upper levels of the castle.

“Coran?” shouts Keith.

“96% integrity and holding,” Coran leans heavily on the controls “I don’t know what that was, but it tore through us like a cheap sheet of paper-crystal.”

“Get us out of here.”

“We’ll just knock you out of warp again!” interjects Lotor “Stand and fight!”

“Fuck you and your perfect hair!” snaps Keith.

A second later the darkness of space blurs, gives way to light, and they are in warp again. There is a tense moment of silence as Voltron waits for the second attack. The moment stretches on longer and longer until it becomes apparent there will be no fresh attack, and as one, they all sag with relief.

“How did you know they only had the power for one attack?” asks Allura.

Keith shrugs “A weapon big enough to knock us out of warp has to take a lot of power. Hunk’s cannon needs at least thirty-five seconds between every shot, and Voltron is a meticulous piece of tech. That thing the empire banged out in, like, eight days. It’s just basic logic.”

With a deep sigh, Keith lowers himself to the ground and stretches out. He seriously considers finishing the nap that Lotor interrupted right here and now. But no, the war-moon is not much further away. He has to be prepared to fight for Pidge’s sake.

“Hold a course for the war-moon. We’re going to see if we can’t dig up something on Matt Holt.”

Pidge flashes a grateful smile at him, then turns her head to the wall.

 

 

In Voltron’s dust, Borf hangs silent and defeated. Voltron called its bluff. The anti-warp weapon can indeed only fire every four minutes. They should have attacked faster- as soon as the war-castle spilled out of the wormhole the blaster tore open. But Lotor wanted to speak to them. He wanted to see their faces. All of their faces, at least once before he kills them. 

Acxa lays a hand on his shoulder “We’ll chalk that one up to a weapon’s test. Tomorrow is another day.”

Lotor does not meet her eyes “Take us home, please.”

When Borf disappears in its own blaze of blue teludav light, a third smaller ship uncloaks itself. It sheds layer upon layer of thick shielding, some of it more advanced than what even the empire has in its repertoire, and tentatively opens its kylgarg to listen to the silence. As long as the frequencies remain quiet but for the normal back-ground chatter of radiation and old echoing radio signals, the ship can judge itself safe and undetected.

The small crew slowly collect themselves.

The captain, a huge Tando female with some horrendous facial scars, leans back in her seat at last “I wonder if we might be the only rebel ship to survive seeing the Little Sun.”

While Lotor’s generals gave the craft an affectionate and teasing nickname, the subjects of the empire have not been so generous. Many names have cropped up since Lotor first revealed his new craft in battle with Voltron. The most popular of them came out of the Altean slums on New Daibazaal, where the weapons for the craft were tested. Alteans and their Galra family members gathered on the outskirts of the shanties to watch the weapon spit fire for kilometres upon kilometres, hewing a great path of destruction. Such was the light and the heat of it that the Alteans nicknamed it the Little Sun.

The second officer Alforis saw it first-hand. She had sneaked home briefly to see her brother’s new baby and ended up also seeing a doomsday weapon getting tested out. But seeing it in battle was far more devastating. The way it tore through the war-castle’s particle barrier was chilling. For a moment, she thought she was going to have to watch the very last functioning war-castle of her people be destroyed by a slap-dash rocket held together with spite and paper-crystal.  
The relief of Voltron’s escape has brought tears to her eyes, and hides her face in her elbow so the others will not notice the shame of her weeping.

Bokorin, the weapons specialist-cum-gunner, sends up a brief prayer of thanks to Willow. At least they got to see the last Altean war-castle. There’s a story for the grand-progeny. 

“Are you alright?” Matt Holt takes one of Bokorin’s many hands “You look like you’re about to choke.”

Bokorin shakes their head “I am only shaken, as one would expect to be. I have never before seen an Altean war-castle.”

“Me either,” Matt shudders “I don’t know who the hell is driving that thing, but they’ve all gotta have gonads of tempered steel to stare down the Little Sun like that.”

“I’ve logged the LS sighting on the kylgarg. We should be on our way now, in case it decides to come back.”

Matt nods enthusiastically “Anywhere but that war-moon.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apparently Pidge has been so good about hiding her face from the public, her own brother doesn't recognise her in that snazzy Green armour. Bearing in mind the last time he saw her, she was in a summer-dress with waist-length hair and an innocent smile that said 'No, I've never electrocuted anyone in my life!'. Probably a bit hard to reconcile this image of your baby sis with the tree-spitting, lightning-tossing Green Paladin?
> 
>  
> 
> Lance translations:  
> 1) How heavy! - just an exclamation of shock. Spanish-speaking equivalent of saying 'get your big butt off me'  
> 2) What's happened- a casual greeting.


	4. “Cling to my udders.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still catching up to Shiro. How'd he get into a Weblum? How'd he find Thace? Let's call this chapter narrative house-keeping

(Some weeks ago)

A plan forms. Shiro and Slav will stowaway on one of the deep-spacers that come in and out of the nearby port. The deep-spacer will get them back on the intergalactic highways, where it will be a simple matter (at least for the Black Paladin) to contact Marmora or one of the other branches of the resistance, and get transport to back to Voltron. All they have to do is lay low until it is possible to snaffle an escape pod or a little exploration vehicle from one of the larger military cruisers. If there’s one thing Shiro has almost perfected, it is the art of stealing pods from giant Galra ships. At this point he could do it with his hands tied behind his back. 

“For the amount they patrol us, the security is pretty lax in the port itself.” Nalqun explains to them “They figure none of us are brazen enough to stow away. They’re right, by the way. Who wants to sneak onto one of those creaky things when we’ve got plenty of good land right here?”

“I don’t.” says Slav with a mournful conviction.

Before the moon’s version of night can fall, Shiro dons his armour. Nalquioria has apparently cleaned it because the inside no longer smells of his own blood and chemical panic. More like a combination of liquid glue and lemonade, and not unpleasantly so. Slav reluctantly puts his weird long sweater-pants back on. He is far more relaxed than the last time Shiro saw him. To be fair, that was in Boss Ma’ams cockpit in the middle of a battle, and Shiro can hardly blame Slav for panicking while Zarkon bellowed for their blood and tried to knock Voltron’s head right off his shoulders. But Shiro expects Slav to return to his old psychotically anxious self as soon as they are on the move again.

 

It occurs to Shiro that he could leave Slav here. Let him live out the rest of his days in peace, telling stories to the lanky Nalise children, filling their heads with nightmares of probability. When he gets back to Voltron he could say he didn’t know where Slav was. Boss Ma’am didn’t put them in the same place. Certainly, Boss Ma’am didn’t want to do anymore damage to Shiro by sending with him the one person who would treat his mental health like a hyperactive cat treats a scratching post. No, no, of course not.  
Why would Boss Ma’am do that to Shiro, her beloved paladin? 

The only downside he can think of is that the Nalise, a people who are peaceful and sassy and surviving the Empire’s rule by all appearances, might lose their minds if he leaves Slav with them. Who knows what Slav’s chattering could incite them to do? A disastrous rebellion just to get away from Slav for a few days? Possibly a public hanging to salvage the quiet of their community?  
Besides, Shiro needs Slav. For whatever scant moral support he can give- Shiro will take any at the moment. And because Slav is smart, talented and generally knows what he is doing, even though he narrates everything he does in a high-pitched whine from start to finish. His intimate knowledge of science and the inner-workings of the Empire will be vital to Voltron’s success assuming Slav survives to plague Voltron once more.

Nalquioria is sad to see him go. He thinks. The look on her face might be transcendent joy at the divulging of her burden, though her words are definitely sad “You need not go so soon. Your strength has not completely returned to you yet.”

“If I wait for it all to come back to me I’ll be down for a long time.” says Shiro.  
Indeed, once all of this mess has come to its natural bloody close, Shiro fully expects to collapse into a coma for at least three months. A necessary convalescence after the two years of hell he has been through so far, and whatever fresh horror is waits for him in the future. Either that, or his soul will give up on his body and abandon the beaten meat-sack for greener astral planes. 

Because the Galra prefer to deprive their subjects of technology that might be used to mount a rebellion, Shiro and Slav have to walk. They are taken down on a path carved into the cliffs. It is out of the way of any ship that might zip past on its way to the port, but it was definitely not made to accommodate anyone as wide as Shiro. The Nalise are all joints and graceful limbs, supple and thin as young trees. Shiro is, by his own admission, an absolute beefcake who has trouble finding shirts to fit his enormous shoulders back on earth. The only person Shiro has ever met who has him beat in the shoulder department is Hunk, and that boy is clearly some kind of demigod with that crazy strength.   
While the Nalise guide strides ahead confidently and Slav slithers all over the cliff-face Shiro sucks in and prays the ledge holds for him. He gets himself over the passage by narrating each perilous step in his head, the way he will for the kids when he gets back to Voltron. Keith will be jealous he wasn’t there, vulnerable to harsh salty winds, with a drop of at least a thousand metres to regret his life choices if he made a misstep. Hunk may well vomit from sympathetic vertigo. 

The end of the path puts them out on a tall, craggy beach, just underneath the belly of the port. Ships land and take-off in huge deafening blasts overhead, sending baking waves of heat over Slav and Shiro as they say goodbye to their Nalise guide. Only when the Nalise is safely concealed on the path once more do they start to climb. This time Slav slows down to watch Shiro’s progress carefully. It seems to have occurred to him that Shiro could drop right off this cliff-face if he makes a misstep or a shock-wave hits him at the wrong angle.

While he winds dizzying circles around Shiro, he offers the closest equivalent of comfort he knows how to deliver “In only 93% of realities does Keith make the choice not to pilot Voltron in your absence. In half of that 7%, he goes off to find you alone in one of the pods.”

God, would he? No. Shiro can’t even take that thought seriously for a moment. Keith would not do that to Voltron. He wouldn’t do that to their friends.

More to distract himself from the fact that gigantic spaceships are blasting sonic fire above his head than because he enjoys the conversation, Shiro replies “Oh yeah? Who pilots Edgy and Boss Ma’am instead?”

“Mostly it is Allura who takes up the mantle of the Black Paladin, but she does not perform well. The Black Lion is ill-suited to a person who prefers to shirk conflict instead of, well, dive into it.”

“Boss Ma’am and I solve more problems than we cause.”

“It’s adorable that you think that. Anyway, to answer your question, sometimes it’s Allura, sometimes it is the orange one- Coran?”

“Coran? Really?”

“The man did watch Voltron’s construction, did he not?”

“Well I guess- but watching something get built doesn’t mean you know how to pilot it. If the world worked by that logic, I would have qualified as a pilot at five years old.”

“It does when you’re Coran. And if it is not Allura or Keith or the loud blue one in the cockpit, then it is your twin-”

“Twin?” Shiro coughs on a purplish mist sprayed from what appears to be the exhaust of a chunky passenger craft. Please let it be exhaust. Not whatever was in the septic tank of that ship “I’ve only got one sibling, Keith.”

“Not in most realities. You have a twin brother. Occasionally a sister.”

“Jesus. Wouldn’t that have been nice. How the hell do you know all these things, Slav?” 

“Through a series of complex mathematical calculations based on the information I already have, extrapolated by the information which is implied and divided by-”

“Ok, I changed my mind. Let your mystery remain mysterious.”

After a ten minute climb Shiro rolls onto a grassy ledge and presses himself low into the ground. The port is not unlike an airport, if the terminals were replaced by a series of open hangars. Passengers and crew file across a maze of landing strips in orderly lines, nonplussed by the proximity of their vulnerable flesh to engines that cough purple fire as they move and accelerate, and the possibility that any one of these huge crafts whizzing all over the place could crash them to jelly. Reminds Shiro of crossing the street in New York City.   
Shiro and Slav crawl up to the edge of the field. The nearest and most obviously Galra ship is three hangars away. This means they will have to somehow scurry through substantial pedestrian traffic- join it, in fact, to avoid being mown down by a careless pilot. Shiro is dressed in his paladin armour. As if that were not bad enough, the intergalactic broadcasts of his matches as Champion means he will absolutely be recognised. If the Nalise, a group who didn’t even have anything that remotely resembled TV to him, could recognise him without issue, then how quickly will these people, saturated in their communications technology?

Unfortunately Slav has a solution “Cling to my udders.”

It takes all of Shiro’s willpower and adult maturity not to smash Slav in the face with a rock “Your what now?”

“Udders. My underside. Is that not the correct mammalian terminology?”

“Not remotely.”

Slav rolls onto his side and gestures to his long belly, recalling, Shiro realises with dread, Rose on the ottoman, beseeching a young Leo to draw her like one of his French girls.  
“Cling to me and I will carry us into the hangar. I am sneaky. You are not. Come, your ape ancestors practically lived on their mothers’ breasts for the first bits of their lives.”

“Alright, alright, but only if you never say ‘breasts’ or ‘udders’ again.”

The ensuing fiasco makes Shiro glad that Voltron is not with him for the first time since he awoke. If Pidge could see him now…  
The important part- the only part Shiro will ever admit to the kids- is that Slav gets them aboard safely without anyone noticing, and they have ample time to stow away in the vents and a floor compartment respectively before the pilots come back. Shiro allows himself to relax a little bit, spooned up on his side in the floor compartment on top of some chilled pipes. Worst to worst he can just knock the guards out and fly the ship himself. 

After about an hour there are footsteps overhead, and two voices. One is quite deep, while the other is so comically high Shiro finds himself muffling a giggle.

“…told my wife it was no big deal, but my husband thought it was. So there the three of us were in the quiznakking emergency room at the latest hour of the night. We’re surrounded by drunks and vandals and there’s this one poor dumb kid with an action figure jammed all the way up his nasal cavities. I know how bad this looks. Galra guy with his Puigian husband and Jaushan wife. The doctors are gonna think we were having some weird kind of sex, and the explanation I got ain’t much better!”

The two of them bust up into laughter. Shiro does too. The squeaky voice, God, it’s like the voices in that terrible Alvin and the Chipmunks series from the 2010’s.

All around him the ship rumbles to life. Engines fire, then backfire, then steady into a low throbbing hum. The pipes under him groan and get a little colder. It’s entirely possible Shiro is lying on the coolant system and is going to be hypothermic by the end of this trip. Oh well. Not like he can move now.

“So did they check out the freckle?”

“Yeah, yeah, it was just a freckle, Craang, it was just a damn stupid freckle. My spouses were so neurotic, though, they kept hammering the doctor with all these questions. The whole time we’re in there the doctor is eyeing us all. I can just tell he’s trying to figure out what the quiznak is going on. One of those rural types, you know? Educated bumpkin right outta the heart of New Daibazaal. Probably his first time seeing a Galra with a spouse that weren’t a Galra too- two of ‘em, at that.”

“Check you out, Klaarg. Educating the masses.”

“I’m a real brave one, huh? Fighting the good fight. Getting hauled to the ER to get a new freckle stared at.”

“Hey, at least you know it’s not space-‘flu. Gotta side with your man an’ your woman on that one.”

Space -‘flu? That wipes the smile off Shiro’s face. First thing he’s doing as soon as he gets back to Voltron is asking Coran whether or not the paladins should be inoculated. So far the lions have kept them from dying the moment they inhale an alien pathogen, but there’s no sense in trying their luck, especially against something called ‘space-‘flu’.

With an alarming boom, the ship rushes forwards and presumably into the atmosphere. This ship is a puddle-jumper, strictly for short-term exploration and recon, maybe a light skirmish. Its mothership is most likely orbiting the moon at this very moment. As best Shiro can glean from the pilots’ chattering, they were on the moon to pick up rare parts for something the empire is building. He catches the word ‘teludav’ once, but dismisses it. No way could the Galra duplicate the blueprints for a teludav.   
The technology is Jurassic compared to the rest of the stuff flitting around. The only reason the teludav at the castle of lions hasn’t keeled over and died is because Coran refuses to allow it to, and begins most days bullying the teludav into working condition with fresh plates of scaultrite, new wiring and curses aimed at the machine’s mother. Incidentally, listening to Coran and his morning routine is how the paladins picked up most of their filthy Altean vocabulary. 

As to what the parts are for? Zarkon’s freaky witch could be up to anything in the labs. Who knows? Maybe the next Sendak-type she sends for Voltron will have a laser cannon mounted to his neck instead of a snazzy robo-arm. 

Shiro is right about the mothership. After the tell-tale thump of stratospheric escape, which sounds something like a wet sock with a rock in the toe being whacked against a bike helmet, it is barely five minutes before they have docked and the pilots are up, exchanging fond curses and sending well wishes to each other’s spouses. Shiro waits six minutes after they are gone before he will risk popping the compartment. All around is the noise of a busy hangar. Galra voices, the hum of ships, the hiss of slim and fiery repair tools being applied to damaged hulls and an unrelenting tromp of feet underneath it all.   
Shuddering at the prospect of again embracing Slav like an infant chimp, Shiro peels his companion out of the supply closet. The two of them creep up to the windshield of the cockpit and take stock of the situation. About as busy as it sounded. The good news is the hangar is quite small, so only thirty or forty people are inside. Which bodes badly for Shiro’s chances of getting to Voltron- a small hangar means a small mothership, and that means this might be a simple patrol ship, touring soldiers around the galaxy to inspect security at some of the empire’s more obscure imperial holdings. Shiro had never heard of Nalquod or its charming moon before Boss Ma’am for some reason dumped him there.

“Ah!” exclaims Slav with his usual tremble of dread “This is a prison-patrol ship. I was on one of these before they took me to be tortured. These little outfits circle the galaxy, collecting political prisoners, freedom fighters, sometimes honest-to-Willow criminals, and dump them off on the prison planets later. I can tell from the ships. And look, that repairman over there, with the five tails. They’re wearing manacles.”

Excellent. The bitter copper taste of an incoming panic attack fills Shiro’s mouth, but he forces it back. Deep breaths. Closes his eyes, pictures himself in the apartment at the Garrison campus. Keith sings along to Bon Iver and leans over a steaming wok in the kitchen unit. He wants to know how much he should let the garlic brown before the beef goes in and Shiro has opened his mouth to say- 

Not right now. He cannot afford to stop functioning right now. He will pay dearly for denying his brain the shut-down he desperately needs, but that can wait.

“I know. Alright, the bridge then. Listen in on the coms or hack the kylgarg. What do you think?”

Slav shrinks into the corner “I think you are going to get yourself caught, tortured and killed.”

The word ‘tortured’ triggers something at the back of his head. The pinch of a surgical wand in his elbow, in the arm he no longer has, and blood in his mouth “No, how do we get off this ship? Work with me here, ferret-man. We can do this.”

“You can do this. I prefer to wait here-”

“I will drag your ass off this puddle-jumper if I have to.”

“In that case, I recommend we each pick a direction. In an hour we meet by this same ship if it is available to us. If it is not, which it won’t be, then I imagine you can improvise an escape for us.”

Into the vents they go. With all the noise and bright lights going on around the bellies of the ships, no one thinks to watch for a paladin and an escapee crouched on a roof, busting open a vent and sneaking into the system.   
Shiro spends a few tense minutes reliving that one part in the first Alien movie. At one point he stops above a quiet hallway and catches his breath while a Galra, a young one by the sounds of it, cusses someone out over the coms.

“…impatient! You’re not a toddler, woman! The least you can do is spare Acxa ten more minutes with her prisoner, but if you find you simply cannot scrounge up the patience then you’re welcome to fling the grunts out of the airlock until we get back. No. No, of course I don’t mean that. Why don’t you ever bring books when we go to prison ships? Narti brings books.”

A couple hundred metres away Shiro decides it is a fine time to check out his surroundings, and knees the vents open. He lands in an empty hallway and is congratulating himself for being the sneakiest paladin in the universe when an unexpected voice sends him rolling for cover, into a nearby supply closet. And he told himself he was never going back in the closet.

“…more for you without calling suspicion down on myself. Please, just think about it.”

Hearing a door slam and the whine of a lock engaging, Shiro peeks carefully down the hall.

A tall figure with the voluptuous outline of a mammal puts their weight against the door, testing the lock. Shiro’s gut twists.

It could be that many Galra have a fine bone structure and sharp jaws and cute little chins that dimple when they smile. It could be that most Galra look like that-or maybe Galra women, in particular, because this soldier seems to be aligned towards that bit of the Galra gender wheel. But why this Galra has those features in the exact same configuration as his little brother’s face, Shiro cannot explain. Why this woman with blue blood on the tips of her fingers is smiling the same smile Keith uses when he tries to hold a laugh in, Shiro does not want to think about.  
He closes his eyes. A shrill whine fills his ears and for a long moment the only thing he can be sure of is the humming ground beneath his feet. When at last he opens his eyes and gasps for breath, the woman is gone, taking the borrowed smile with her.

Shiro steps out into the hall and shirks the wall until he can reach the door. It’s a thick one with one of those serious sonic-locks they put on the cells of high-risk prisoners. Back when he was called Champion, Shiro used to be carted back to his cell in restraints which would release automatically only when the sonic lock was engaged and the unfortunate soldiers who had ferried him were well out of his reach. Part of what made his escape possible was learning he could undo these locks with the right frequency from his palm.   
Shiro presses his palm over the door and waits with bated breath. He looks the way the Galra woman went, and prays she will not come back. And for that matter, that he’s not about to unleash a monstrosity which would rather drink his blood than thank him for taking the time to spring it from prison. He’s working off the presumption that whatever the Galra want locked up, he wants to be free to cause them as much trouble as possible.

Still, he is floored for the second time in two minutes when he pushes the door open and finds Thace balled up on a bunk.

“Thace?” he croaks.

“Go away Acxa.” says Thace.  
He does not raise his head. It is only from his ears and the colour of his fur that Shiro knows him at all- that, and he makes a point of not forgetting a face (or a pair of ears) these days, for safety’s sake.

Shiro steps into the room and gently pokes Thace between the ears “Thace.”

With a faint growl, Thace unrolls onto his back to fix Shiro with a furious glare, which melts into a look of slack-jawed shock. Shiro cannot help but gape back.

Evidently that explosion did not kill Thace. But it appears to have done as much damage as possible without shearing his face off entirely. The side of his face that must have been turned to the blast gives the impression that Thace recently took up moisturising with a cheese grater. That eye is gone so the eyelid has nothing to stop it from sinking back into the socket. In a sharp contrast that makes the damaged half all the more disastrous, the rest of Thace’s face is clean and undamaged.  
Enough time has passed since Shiro saw him last- or at least since he was supposedly pulverised by a fiery explosion- that whatever hair was singed off has grown back, except for a bit of a decrease in the hairline around the scar tissue. Thace is remarkably healthy-looking. Like he just had a spa-day. What the hell? Shiro doesn’t remember looking like that when he was imprisoned. Most of the time he looked worse than the things he killed for the amusement of the empire.

After a long, long moment, Shiro manages to find his voice “You look great!”

“How…” sputters Thace.

“I mean, considering you’re supposed to be dead. You’re glowing with health.”

“The security…” 

“It’s great! That you’re not dead. Um, so I’m about to get off this ship and head for Voltron. Wanna come?”


	5. “Remember the time Keith face-planted into a desert at, like, 1000 metres per second?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter took a long time to get done! I blame a combination of university assignments and trying to find a dang apartment that'll accept both my poor ass and my cat. Australian housing markets are nightmares second only to that final nightmare which awaits us all in hell.

The siren goes off at a fantastic volume and the lights throughout the castle dim to mood-lighting: Coran’s polite way of asking the Paladins to get their asses to the bridge as fast as possible. Used to be he would just turn on the emergency lighting as a summons, but Lance had a bad habit of sleeping through that because of his sleeping mask and necessitated a physical extraction from his room, sometimes from the tangle of covers he clung onto in protest. So Coran cobbled together a few of the most irritating noises he could think of and arranged them into an equally irritating symphony he now blares whenever he needs the Paladins fast.   
Coran is quite pleased with the effect of the emergency siren. Where once the Paladins would stall and fuss with their armour and appear long minutes apart, they now race each other to the bridge to silence the siren. Today it is Shiro who gets to the bridge first. Such is his urgency to get the siren to shut up he has not even changed out of the tent-like Batman shirt and sweatpants he sleeps in. Shiro whizzes past Coran and slams his fist into the siren. One last shrill whine fades into silence. 

Shiro leans there wheezing from his murder-sprint, sleep-mussed hair in his eyes “Are- are we at the war-moon already?”

Coran gestures to the windows, where a red-earthed, forest-pocked moon with purple seas hangs in orbit around a bigger, lumpier planet, just behind which is a huge orange sun. The sun is of such an impressive size Shiro can see plasma currents running together on its surface like the broken yolk of an egg.  
“Welcome to Corixi, moon of-” here he makes a gagging noise that is impossible to copy “Assuming all goes well on Corixi, we’ll pop into its furthest neighbour, the gas planet Three-Rings.”

“They called it Three-Rings?”

“Your planet is essentially named ‘dirtball’. I hardly think you’re in a position to pass judgement.”

The rest of the Paladins skid into the room as one. Both Keith and Allura are still struggling into the top-halves of their armour, and while Lance is fully dressed, he is only semi-conscious because he was roused from a power-nap. Still, the first thing he does is whip out a hair-tie and order Shiro to stand still so he can give him a braid. Pidge is absolutely sick with anxiety. Her face is colourless and she has the kind of sweat on her brow most people only have while in the waiting-room of a dentist’s office just before they get a root canal.   
But she is ready, her bayard already in hand, jaw set in determination and eyes blazing behind her glasses.

Allura puts her arms up so Keith can push the torso-piece over her head “How are the barriers doing?”

“Back to full Princess. I shouldn’t worry about us.”

“We won’t be dashing around a war-moon.” puts in Shiro with a sympathetic look at Pidge “Just get in and out as fast as you can. However sneaky you guys try to be, which you aren’t- you really aren’t, I’m sorry, you are not subtle people…these soldiers are going to raise the alarm. We’ll have a short window to get over to Three-Rings and investigate.”

“Three-Rings?” Keith snorts “Really?”

“That’s what I said.”

Coran ignores this “Get to the lions, then! This moon’s got defences around it that aren’t meant to allow alien ships through. If Voltron hits these defences at the wrong angles, all kinds of magnetic misery is going to be wrought.”

“Will we die?” says Shiro, perhaps a little too hopefully.

“We’ll stay back at a safe distance, but the Paladins could be immobilised long enough that the local security might take a chance and go for them.” Coran stares at Voltron “What are you all still doing here? Go! Quickly now, to the lions! Go! Go!”

Clapping, he chases the Paladins back the way they came with some shooing motions that recalls a child scattering pigeons. 

“Are you sure you’ll be alright out here?” Allura calls over her shoulder.

“You worry about yourself out there. We’ll be just right as rain” Coran glances at Lance “Did i use that term correctly?”  
Lance gives him a thumbs-up. 

The lions have begun to hum with anticipation. Via their respective bonds with the Paladins, the lions each know when they are about to be taken out for a fly and will react accordingly.  
Edgy purrs at the sight of Lance and dissolves her particle barrier. Her jaw cranks open and Lance hops in eagerly, scrambling into the seat within a matter of seconds. A while back they came to a mutual decision that taking the zip-line in took far too long, so now Lance zips up her tongue like a kid scrambling up the biggest slide in the playground. 

The sound of purring reverberates all around him. “Edgy, my sugar-spun goddess of badass!” Lance revs the engines “Are you ready to save the universe?”

A rumble to the affirmative. Edgy leans back on her forelegs and whips her tail, lolloping around the hangar while Lance eggs her on with whoops and laughter.

“Six earth-minutes to launch.” says Coran through the speakers.

Over in the next hangar, Hunk dashes through the entry corridor and skids into his seat. Kitty gets up on the pads of his paws. His tongue swipes over his muzzle, and he sneezes, creating a small sonic blast.   
“Bless you! What’s wrong with you? Are you allergic to something?” Hunk notices a blood-stain on the dashboard and vaguely remembers dribbling a nosebleed all over his lion the last time he returned from a battle “Oh, wow, wouldn’t it be weird if you were allergic to me? I’ve really gotta stop bleeding on you. I’m sorry, I bet the other lions don’t have this problem.”

Just opposite his hangar, Keith wrestles with a lever attached to his seat. First he extends his leg-room by gentle centimetres. Then for some reason the entire seat rockets backwards and leaves him kicking for the pedals like a toddler in a high-chair, so scoots forwards gracelessly. The process begins again “Goddamit! Boss, why do you keep doing this?”  
For some reason Boss Ma’am has yet to divulge or even acknowledge, every time Keith leaves the cockpit she shoots the seat as far back as it will go, which is well outside the range of Keith’s short legs. 

Not that Keith hasn’t asked her. He has screamed “Why?!” to the roof many times and never got a response. He figures it must be a passive-aggressive way of reminding him that Boss Ma’am does not belong to him. The man who watches Voltron’s battles in the cockpit beside Coran is her Paladin, and when he resolves whatever problem it is keeping Boss Ma’am from allowing him to resume control, this allegiance between her and Keith will end. 

“Four earth minutes to launch. Shiro, do you want to drive the castle this time…”

While Keith grapples with his confidence and the lever of his seat, Pidge has just begun to cry. She was determined to stay strong for this mission. Grit her teeth, swallow her tears, and fears with them, and see this through to the end without complaint because the team were doing this for her and her only-but the moment Greenbean let out a purr of welcome, Pidge’s defences collapsed in on her and she now finds herself weeping with her forehead pressed to Greenbean’s seat-cushion.   
She should have expected this. Greenbean is where she comes to cry when Shiro’s shoulder is unavailable. 

“What if he’s been dead this entire time?” she whispers, afraid her team might hear her even though the intercoms haven’t been switched on yet “What if I’m forcing us into danger again and again for a dead man? But even if he’s dead I want to take his body home- I want him home, with us, I want something under his headstone if he is dead. I want to bring him home to Momma even if, if it’s just a piece of him, and Dad too…”

“Two earth minutes!”

And finally, Allura is strapping herself in to Guapa. She takes her cues from Lance as to how she should interact with her. According to Lance, if Allura wants the best possible performance out of Guapa then she has to open by letting Guapa know she is glad to be there.   
Allura seizes the throttle “Hello. You’re…you’re looking quite splendid today. I love what you’re doing with your, ah, your paintwork. So glossy.”

Guapa rumbles to let her know the quality of compliments are improving. The hangar doors unlock in a deep, simultaneous click, and the tug of depressurisation worries at the lions’ paws like an under-tow

“Launch in, wait, how long is a second?” a brief scuffle over the intercoms, then Shiro says “Launch in five, four, three, two-”

Guapa drills head-first through the lower-half of her hangar door.

“Quiznak!” shrieks Allura, almost in unison with Shiro shouting “Go!” 

The rest of Voltron departs in a tight formation with Boss Ma’am at the head. Guapa is rolling head-over-heels in the vacuum of space; Allura is apparently too embarrassed to correct their trajectory.

“Are you alright?” asks Keith.

“I am so sorry.” 

“Hey, we’ve all been there!” Lance steadies Guapa by catching her scruff in Edgy’s jaws, nudging her towards the formation “Remember the time Keith face-planted into a desert at, like, 1000 metres per second?”

“So did you!”

“Yeah, but you started it. You set a bad example for me, your innocent junior-”

“Get it together, Voltron.” this is Shiro “Not you Allura- we can fix that door, right Coran?”

“Probably!”

“Allura, you’re doing great.”

In Guapa’s cockpit, there is the distinct sound of Allura knocking her head against the dashboard “I will get better at this.”

On Coran’s orders, Voltron breaks off into two groups. First Edgy and Greenbean will zip into the tiny blind-spot of the tractor beams that are in orbit, with the intention of tearing in half all of the ships that try to come through without the unique magnetic shields local ships use. While this security might be good enough to keep out larger cruisers and modest scouting ships, Greenbean and Edgy are able to pop through the field as easily as sand through a sieve.

“We’re through!” hoots Pidge. Though her face is still wet, there is no trace of tears in her voice “Stay steady. You’re gonna feel a strong pull from both sides.”

At Keith’s request, Allura flies Guapa up under Boss Ma’am so close that her head is grazing the black lion’s belly. Damn good thing she did- the moment they enter the field Guapa nearly whizzes off into the pull of a tractor beam, stopped only when Boss Ma’am clamps her in place with her claws.  
Less than a second after they pierce through the field, a bubble of crackling blue energy suddenly materialises between Hunk and the rest of the pride less than a metre in front of Kitty’s muzzle.

“Shit!” Hunk pulls back just in time to save Kitty from being fried against the barrier “Shit, shit, we tripped the security! They set up a planetary quarantine!”

“Fuck!” Keith slams a fist on his arm-rest “Dammit, alright- you three, get down to the moon now and get what you can get on Matt. Coran, warp over to Three-Rings and I want you right behind him, Hunk, and see what you can scrounge up on the helmets.”

The three lions peel off into the atmosphere with Greenbean leading the charge, leaving Boss Ma’am to pace in front of Kitty.

“I’m gonna try teleporting.” says Keith, a tremor in his voice. Teleporting is a new and dangerous ability which he barely has a handle on- he could end up where he wants to be, or he could end up lightyears away. Nearly every time he has tried it, the result has been the latter.

“Not sure that’s a good idea-” starts Shiro. 

“Don’t you fucking dare.” says Lance “You are so shit at that, you’re gonna end up on Mars or something-”

The Black Lion disappears in a mighty crack of white light. 

“Did-did Keith just go?” says Allura “Should we come back?”

“Goddamit, I’m coming back-”

Pidge is already falling to the surface of Corixi “Lance, please! We need to do this fast and you’re the fastest.”  
Guapa hesitates briefly, then goes after Greenbean.

Silhouetted against the pale atmosphere of Corixi, Hunk can see the red lion starting backwards and forwards in indecision. 

“Shit!” Edgy rears back violently and surges to Greenbean’s side.

“I’ve got a bead on them.” Coran breaks in with a remarkable calm “He over-shot, that’s all. He’s already at Three-Rings.”

“Fucking idiot!” cries Lance.

“So he’s out of range to us- Coran, stay in contact with him, will you? Let us know if he’s got orders for Voltron.”

“Will do princess. Come along then, Hunk.”

 

By the time they have pierced the atmosphere of Corixi, the surface of the moon swarms with activity. Directly beneath them is the largest arms factory on the entire war-moon. The complex stretches from horizon to horizon- a massive smoggy stain of black fringed by an anaemic forest. Towers rise from the domes and the blocks of the factories, spaced about a mile apart, and bristle with weapons that are quickly being trained in Voltron’s direction.  
Pidge scans the sprawl of the complex until her eyes land on a heavily guarded dome. The ceiling of it is drenched in wires, glowing with energy and information- that can only be the mainframe of the factory’s computer. It has got to be one of the most slap-dash and inefficient systems Pidge has ever seen. The more Galra outposts she sees like this, the more Pidge is surprised that an empire run on such thinly spread resources has managed to dominate and spread for ten thousand years. With this kind of gum-and-paperclip technology the Galra wouldn’t have lasted ten minutes on earth.

“Can you guys draw fire?” she revs Greenbean’s engines, preparing to lunge forwards “I need to get to that glowey dome.”

“Got it. We’ll hold off on breaking stuff that looks important ‘til you have what you need.” promises Lance. He sounds awful, and for a second, Pidge hates Keith a little bit. Keith has no idea what it does to Lance when he acts so recklessly. 

All at once the weapons start to fire. They fill the air with hot red light- lasers, of course, shred the lions if they take enough hits.   
Pidge ploughs on through the heavy fire. The two closest towers swivel their weapons to track her. Lasers ping off Greenbean in every direction until Edgy body-slams the tower on the left, and snaps the thing like a pretzel stick.

“Thanks!”

“Get a move on, gremlin!”

Guapa fires up the gun in her tail and shoots a huge beam of ice that blasts the tower to pieces, and the block behind it, and the satellite dish behind that and blazes off over the horizon. A plume of fire and sparks narrowly misses engulfing Edgy, who ends up blundering into a high dome and crashing into the interior of the factory.

“Whup! Soy un desastre.”  
Lance has just crashed through the roof of what appears to be a mechanised factory floor building the hulls of the standard model of Galra scouting ships. The scale of it is absolutely dizzying: floor after floor, falling all the way to what must be the core of the moon, and afire from the light of welding torches. Lance resists the urge to shoot the crap out of the floor and exits the way he came, only to find Allura has made some friends. A handful of wicked-looking fighters are hot on her tail- actually, hot on her flanks, staying well out of the range of Guapa’s icy tail. 

“Remote drones!” she shouts “Are there any personnel actually on this fucking moon, or are we just gonna be punching robots this whole time?”

Lance dodges another volley of laser fire and picks off the outermost drone. It pops with a satisfying burst of purple fire and smoke “What, you want to fight organics? With families and children? And lovers and-”

“Obviously not! It just strikes me as a terrible idea to completely automate a factory!” she breaks off into a blood-thirsty scream as she headbutts another drone out of the sky “Because two jackass teenagers in flying lions could take the whole thing down, like we are!”

“Well why don’t you write them a letter of complaint?”

Lance and Allura stay close to Pidge’s dome. It’s not exactly the best position because it gives the drones ample chance to swarm and swamp them with laser-fire, but it means they take the attention off of Pidge. And Pidge is booking it down into the dome just as fast as she can. She has a vague idea that crashing through the ceiling of it will not destroy the information she is after, hopefully, and takes it on faith. Greenbean discharges what looks like an entire redwood into the ceiling to open their way.

“I’m in!” says Pidge.

She can hardly hear Lance over the whistle of laser-fire “To the computer? That was fast.”

“No, the dome-”

“Take your time! No hurry here!”  
Pidge still doesn’t know if Allura is attempting human sarcasm when she talks like that or if she genuinely means it.

Greenbean cranks her jaw open and fairly spits Pidge out onto the floor. In spite of the external size of the dome the inside is no bigger than the inside of an airplane with a modestly-sized computer parked in the centre of the tubular insides. The redwood is lodged and groaning menacingly overhead, having pierced through the other side and out into the open air again. Pidge catches a glimpse of laser-fire and the black body of a drone zooming past the gaps. She sprints over the carpet of rubble, coughing on the dust, and skids on her knees to the tiny interface picked out into the hide of the otherwise solid black machine. It is the only visible seam and equipped with a protruding keyboard. Thank God she knows the Galra alphabet- Greenbean is half useless when it comes to translating the foreign written word.

With the scream of drone-fire and warring lions in her ears, Pidge crouches up against the glowing blue shell of the computer and jams an Altean flashdrive into the interface. Coran did not seem to know what kind of power he was giving Pidge when he gave her the means to transport computer viruses with her. She has been building up a veritable library of viruses over the last few months. Each is more horrific and grotesque than the last. Hunk has taken to calling her ‘Frankenstein’, and holds a slight terror of her ever since he glanced over her shoulder while she was building a virus and saw the kind of virus she was committing to code.   
Used to be she would just use ‘Bob’ or ‘Steve’ and the like, but the naming system naturally evolved into a more expressive and Avant-garde thing. The one Pidge has just jammed into the interface is named ‘Scary stranger staring at a lone woman on a train platform’. She meant for the title to communicate the horror one feels when being observed without permission, the dread that the observer will do them harm- because this virus captures every bit of security footage, sends it to her home computer, and then utterly destroys the machine it just robbed. 

Pidge types a command for ‘Scary stranger’ to collect all the visual information from within twelve months, then dives for cover as a bit of the dome rains in around her. Greenbean hunkers under the redwood for shelter.

“Hey!”

“We’re getting hammered up here!” shouts Lance into the coms “How much longer do you need?”

Pidge glances at the screen “Maybe two minutes? The virus needs time to destroy the machine-”

“Just get the footage and we’ll destroy on the way up!” orders Allura in her imperious ‘princess voice’.

“Half a minute then! Can you last that long?”

“That’s what she said.” blurts Lance “I’m sorry. I couldn’t not do that one.”

In spite of the terrible situation, Pidge can’t help but crack up “You’re awful.”

“I know, Pidgie, I know.”

 

Over in the orbit of Three-Rings, Keith is dusting off swearwords he hasn’t been able to bring himself to use since Shiro caught him swearing at Mario Kart and literally washed his mouth out with soap. No sooner than he had mentioned the possibility of teleporting was he teleported. Without his permission, without a hint of warning from Boss Ma’am and what’s worse is his team probably thinks he did it of his own volition. When Boss Ma’am suddenly bent space-time around them Keith was opening his mouth to shut up Lance by telling him, alright, alright, he agreed it would be safer to use the teludav. Instead he ended up staring at the mud-coloured atmosphere of Three-Rings, between the lowermost of its belts, with his mouth hanging open like he was inviting a bird inside to make its nest.

“- and that goes for your mother too!” 

Boss Ma’am rumbles at him. She wants to know if he is finished.

Keith pants and fogs up the visor of his helmet, his face red “No! No I am not done! What the fuck? Seriously? You cannot keep pulling shit like that on your paladins! I swear to God, I swear to all the gods ever, if you do that to me, I will fight my way through space and come back and punch you in the nose. I will- I will dry dock your ass! I mean it, don’t think I don’t mean it!”

The register of her purr changes; she begins to laugh.

Keith strains against his harness though he is not sure what he even wants to attack “You- don’t you laugh at me! Y’aint gonna be able to fly without my ass firmly planted in this seat! Shiro can’t getcha moving! You better not toss me out into space! If you think you can just nab another paladin or, I don’t fucking know, drag Coran in here, you have another thing coming lady!”

There’s a crackle of blue energy. Kitty and the castle tumble out. A second later, Shiro is screaming in his ear. Funny how his voice changes pitch when he uses Japanese. It gets a lot deeper, more conducive to communicating anger. Keith feels sorry for Hunk and Coran who have no way of understanding what Shiro is saying- apart from the context that he is fucking furious. It must sound terrifying.

“- THE FUCK WAS THAT? RIGHT IN FRONT OF EVERYBODY? WE’RE A TEAM, JAE-AN, NOT A FUCKING CIRCUS.”

Shiro just first-named him. This is bad.

It takes him a couple of tries to shout Shiro down, and when he finally gets it out Hunk has also begun to shout because there is some kind of craft incoming that may intend to kill them.

“IT WASN’T ME IT WAS YOUR DAMN LION!”

He can practically hear Shiro’s blood pressure raising “BOSSY- Bossy- Bossy, you cannot. You cannot do this. You cannot do this, Bossy, you cannot. Launch me wherever you want, fine, but the second you get on Jae-an, uh, Keith’s case, I will dry-dock you.”

“I don’t know what either of you are saying, but I think we’re about to die.”

Obviously the warning got through to Three-Rings before Voltron did: a fleet of the wasp-shaped Galra fighters are tearing through the outermost clouds of the atmosphere in an attack formation.

“Shit!” Kitty’s cannon pops out of his shoulder “Shit, shit, shit! Ok, um, do we still want to try information gathering? ‘Cos I feel like it’d end up like a Light Brigade situation.”

“Give ‘em a warning shot.” says Keith, at the same time that Shiro says “You might as well fire.”

“What the hell, Shiro?”

“They don’t look like they wanna negotiate to me!”

“Where the hell is your chill?”

“I left it with the Galra! Remember that, Bossy? When you fired my ass out into space because I kept farting? At least that’s the only reason I can think of to justify your cruelty-”

“This is the Yellow Paladin, paging scary Galra fleet.” Hunk has flipped down his visor and fished the appropriate frequency out of the background chatter. In the cockpit of the head of the fleet, his square form looms over the visual channel, and sends a shiver through the captain “As you can see I’m here with Bo- uh, the Black Paladin, and our war castle. I’m gonna guess you guys don’t get paid enough to deal with quiznak like this. A shitty outpost on the outskirts of the empire? That planet looks really muddy. I mean, I don’t wanna piss on the people who live down there, but that place looks really unpleasant.”

In spite of herself the captain, who was among the first settlers on Three-Rings, says “No, no, we hate it too. It rains flaming rocks and mud. Like, mud will just start pouring out of the sky for no reason.”

“Exactly! So I don’t wanna make your lives any more difficult. We have some questions. You have some answers. We’ll just ask and be on our way. No one has to get hurt. How does that sound?”

“I think that sounds wonderful!” chirps Coran.

A brief silence. The lieutenant mutters into their headpiece, urging the captain to take the deal. A tiny sob of relief escapes one of the petty officers; when he heard that Voltron had tripped the perimeter alarm over on Corixi, he genuinely thought he was going to be eaten by a mechanical lion before the day was out.

“What do you need to know?” says the captain at last.

“Good job Hunk.” whispers Keith.

There is a sound from the castle that might be Shiro smacking his own forehead, or Coran giving him a cuff.

“Has this planet been visited by a human? He would have come by post-terraform. The second human prisoner to escape the gladiator rings.”

“He’s tiny,” puts in Shiro “His eyesight is bad, so he might have been using some kind of staff to help him move.”

A couple of derisive laughs from the fleet.

“I remember that staff!” says one of the officers “So did my black eye!”

“He broke my helmet open.”

“He swatted me across the room.”

The captain cuts across the chatter “Yes! Yes, he was here, him and that rebel splinter of Marmora.”

Keith perks up in his seat “You believe he was attached to the rebel group?”

“I think he was leading it. Or co-leading. I don’t know. He was giving orders. I’ve told you what you wanted to know-”

“Not yet,” Kitty’s cannon lifts a couple of metres as if to fire “What was he here for?”

“The prince. The splinter was after the prince at the time, though I don’t know if they were going to kill him or what-”

“Was he killed?”

Another round of laughs, with another sneaky sob mixed in from the same officer.

“I’d like to think we gave as good as we got,” says the captain with an edge to her voice “I cannot tell you anything else.”

“Fine.” Keith takes a deep breath in and lets it out with a whistle “Fine. Is this going to cause problems for your base? Or can you just pretend we never here? I think it would be easier for all of us if we agreed Voltron never came to Three-Rings.”

“What, you think I’m going to risk the ire of the brat in the throne by telling him of any of this? I’m not in this for the glory of Galra. I’m just trying to get my people back to their families.”

After that there is little to say. The fleet return to Three-Rings with a clumsy haste that reminds Keith of the way he used to run when Shiro caught him pilfering the cookie jar, the crumbs of his crime still on his chin as he fled, sure that his brother was finally going to make good on his promise to sell Keith to a mortician as an apprentice. Coran returns them to roughly where they were when Boss Ma’am took it upon herself to bend space-time, and they arrive just in time to witness an explosion so fantastically massive they have to shield their eyes against the glare.

“Lance? Guys, report! Are you dead or what?”

Pidge’s voice bursts over the intercoms, accompanied by a background roar that can only be the explosion they are seeing “We’re fine, thanks for asking!”

“What the hell did you just blow up?”

“Everything!” say Lance and Allura in a perfect, creepy unison.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lance's translation: I am a disaster


	6. "In your infinite wisdom, you named the poor kitten ‘toilet paper’-”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter took a long time in coming and it's not particularly scintillating. Sorry about that. Had to move out, move in, write four papers for university and start job-hunting again, so basically every time-consuming thing there is in life came at me all at once. Except for a protracted illness, I guess?   
> Anyway! Gore warning for this one- like, seriously, gory.

(A month or so earlier)

However badly Shiro expected his mission to go, he did not think he was going to have to complete it with a half-drugged panther man more than twice his own weight. It is a testament to his weight-training regime that Shiro can even move with Thace slung on his back- let alone run. Wriggling through the vents is now entirely out of the question. Shiro himself could barely fit in there, with his damn broad shoulders and child-bearing hips. Trying to drag Thace through the narrow vents is a one-way ticket to re-enacting ‘147 Hours’, except instead of gnawing off one of his own limbs to free himself Shiro will probably have to chew Thace in half.  
So now he’s on the ground, trying to find his way back to the hangar with so much subtlety he might as well being humming the theme to ‘Pink Panther’. The only reason he has not yet been caught and tossed into a cell with Thace is because there’s some sort of disturbance on the bridge. All the soldiers he has seen, a mix of Galra and other peoples he does not know how to name, have been hustling for the bridge at the far end of halls, too perturbed by whatever has summoned them to even notice there is a human with an unconscious Galra on his back shirking the wall.

“What did they do to you?” mumbles Shiro.

Thace is just about conscious. A rush of the Galra equivalent of adrenalin is helping him to keep his eyes open. Other than that he is completely limp and could hardly move his arms to loop around Shiro’s neck. 

“Sedated.” he says slowly “Acxa...worries I don’t sleep…sleep enough here.”

“She drugged you? Damn that’s dark.”

“I asked her.”

“Oh. Ok. So the timing is just bad on my part.”  
Thace grunts an affirmative and nearly slides off Shiro sideways. 

The thunder of marching soldiers comes towards them. Shiro scoots into a nearby airlock, shut, mercifully, and ducks down behind the door. Thace crushes him. A vertebra makes an alarming noise somewhere towards the bottom of his spine. There is a distinct possibility he will never stand up again.   
He catches a few fragments of the conversation of the passing soldiers.

“-bastard prince-”

“-paranoid-”

“-throws us into chaos every time he sees something Paladin shaped-”

At that last comment, Shiro’s blood runs cold. Someone knows. Who were they cursing? A prince? Zarkon has a son, or a daughter or child who uses the term. God, he hopes that child is not a biological one. The possibility that someone would sleep with Zarkon enough times as to successfully sire a mini-tyrant is terrifying.

Shiro quickly gets lost. He has no idea where he is- not that he had much of an idea on where he was going in the first place, but it seems impossible that he will manage to find the pre-arranged meeting place with Slav again. His best bet for the moment is to run around wearing Thace like a backpack (only slightly heavier than the one he used to carry to high-school, now that he thinks about it) and try whatever direction feels right. Left feels like a good way to go, so off he goes, thinking to himself that there was a time when he might have applied logic or some skill he learned from one of his two PhDs to figure out which way is the most likely to have a hangar at the end of it. Now all he has the energy for is a mental coin toss. 

Left, says the coin, go left.

 

(Now)

Shiro blows up the Weblum. Two PhDs aside, the insides of a gigantic dead alien are just unpredictable.

Fortunately Shiro holds off on blowing up their only protection from the devastating vacuum of space until they arrive at their location: Bagorraia. Liberation aside, Bagorraia still has a trade to run. Weblum are still brought to the planet for harvest, but now it is the Bagorris people who control the profits, the working hours, the unions, and the Galra have decided it is not worth mounting a pricey reclamation campaign when allowing the Bagorris to run an autonomous trade is only slightly more expensive than the slave labour before it.  
A remarkable change, considering Voltron apparently only liberated Bagorraia two weeks ago. Even as Shiro hauls ass through the halls of the presidential palace, he can’t help but feel pride for what Voltron has done. Keith has really come into his own as a leader! Whatever havoc the fake Shiro has brought with him isn’t enough to undermine the team. The team has grown so much even just in the months he has been gone.

“I cannot believe you,” roars Thace in his ear “I cannot believe you are still alive! I cannot believe you ever convinced Voltron to follow you, you incredible idiot. I wouldn’t follow you to a gas station!”

Shiro vaults over a table under which a couple of freshly elected senators have taken shelter “Congratulations on the liberation! Vrepit Sol!”

“I think I was probably safer on the prison satellite!” Thace ducks under the table and scatters the senators “Excuse me, sorry. Vrepit Sol.”

“Are they still behind us?”

A laser skims the top of Shiro’s helmet.

Thace glances over his shoulder “They’re still behind us.”

‘They’ is a uniformed guard of an indiscriminate gender, or possibly no gender at all. Shiro and Thace were surprised to be received violently when the guard spotted them. They appeared to be a native person but behaved very much like a Galra drone in that they charged the hapless Paladin and Blade before either of them could get out “Have you seen our ferret man?”  
Slowly but surely the reason for their rage has been revealed, as they scream through their helmet. They are outraged by the Blade of Marmora’s presence on Bagorraia. The planet is freshly liberated. The government is attempting to legitimise itself in the eyes of the Galra empire and cannot yet afford to be associated with Voltron’s Coalition and its militia, so they would very much appreciate it if Thace, quite obviously a Blade with his knife on his belt and Shiro, disguised in the uniform of a Blade, would excuse themselves from the planet. At least, that’s how Shiro chooses to interpret the volley of curses and lasers at his heels.

(Then)

Left is wrong. Left is very wrong and Shiro will never trust his mental coin toss again. Left he trusts blindly because all the soldiers he has seen so far have been at comfortable distances, so he gives only a precursory glance down the left-wards hall before he tears down it with his heavy load. He totally misses a shorter person of a mixed-heritage he recognises as partially Galra and either human or Altean- really, there is almost no difference. So does this person, who runs right into Shiro’s chest and is knocked sprawling.

Even as he rolls back he starts to shout abuse at Shiro. Folded in half, addressing his own gut angrily, the person cries “Soldier! Watch where you’re going! You would injure your prince-” he rolls into a sitting position and freezes at the sight of Shiro.

Prince?

“Prince Lotor.” rasps Thace.

“Kuron?” Lotor’s face turns a fantastic shade of magenta “What the quiznak are you doing back here? I gave no orders! Put that prisoner down this instant!”

The sound of a word of his own language out of a Galra prince is so shocking Shiro barely registers the rest of what was said “What did you call me? ‘Clone’? Why did you call me that?”

Lotor’s eyes grow wide “Oh, Borf. It’s actually you.”

His vision flashes white. A searing pain splits his forehead. Before he knows he has moved, his boot is on the prince’s skinny neck.

“What the fuck do you mean by calling me ‘Kuron’.” he growls.

The prince’s claws scrabble at his boot. But the weight of Shiro and the huge Galra man on his back proves too great. Shiro eases up just a bit to give the prince the breath to speak.

Lotor’s face contorts. In that moment, Shiro is certain that he must be Zarkon’s by blood, because his face in anger is the same as his father’s “You don’t know what it’ll do to Voltron if you go near them. They’ll all die. They’ll die screaming.”

He lets Thace slide to the floor and picks the prince up by his collar, one hand pushed against his neck. Lotor braces himself with his feet against Shiro’s thighs. It doesn’t seem to occur to him to kick Shiro in the small intestines.

“Tell me what you did.”

“Tell me,” gasps Lotor “Tell me what you did. Where did you go? Where have you been?”

“I’ve been nowhere.”

His eyes flash “The quiznakking Nalise. They healed you, didn’t they? I can smell their soil on your armour.”

“No-”

“Yes. Yes, you’ve been skulking on that dead moon this whole time haven’t you? And they say Voltron is brave.” Lotor coughs, wrestling weakly with the hand on his throat “Voltron is nothing. To think I was scared of them.”

Shiro slams him against the wall. The strange headache pulses behind his temples. His vision blanks for a few seconds. When it comes back to him Lotor is laughing at him, smiling at him with Zarkon’s smile “Poor Paladin. Lost his kittens. Who’s the man in your nest now, Paladin?”

“What did you do?”

“Oh wouldn’t you love to know? I should warn you, stay away from Voltron. If you go near them the other you- the better you- will detonate on sight.”

 

(Now)

What would the Bagorris do if Shiro whipped off his helmet right now? For species who can recognise physical features he is quite obviously the former Black Paladin and current co-pilot of the Altean war-castle, and before that, the mysterious Champion who essentially introduced the unique horror of the human race to the universe. Of course they would expect him to have longer hair. His copy up in the castle has been wearing (for reasons totally inscrutable to Shiro) a man bun. Not that it doesn’t look good. Shiro will concede that long hair suits him- it softens what Keith calls his ‘shovel jaw’ and brings out his eyes.   
If Shiro were to turn around right now and face down their determined pursuer with his face bared, it would definitely be cause for hesitation on their part. Everybody knows the Blade and Voltron are working together. If Voltron is a hand, then the Blade is the middle finger humans are so fond of sticking up in insult. Would it really be so strange to see a sort-of Paladin in Blade uniform? He distinctly remembers catching glimpses of Keith in an adorably under-sized uniform on the feeds last week, though the footage was grainy and Hunk’s broad back got in the way of him quickly. The only problem would be that Shiro’s got an inexplicably short haircut and looks far less moisturised and well-rested than the fake. 

And the news would travel back to Voltron, somehow, because the universe enjoys screwing Shiro over like that, and if it does not cause a repeat of what happened with the Nalise then it will probably cause the fake to detonate ahead of schedule.   
So instead of revealing himself as the true Shiro he hops out of a three-story window, falls into a springy bush and is shortly thereafter flattened by Thace.

“You bastard.” he wheezes from underneath Thace’s spine.

“Well excuse me for thinking you were going to get out of my way.”

 

(Then)

Shiro’s forehead is almost against Lotor’s “Tell me what you did.”

“Ask Sendak.”

The name sends a shiver through him- the smell of anti-septic and being pinned on his back “Sendak is dead. I shot him out into space.”

“One of him. Not even the first of him.”

Shiro only survives what happens next because of Lotor. The prince knows they are not alone. He cannot help but look away from Shiro’s face even though it is only for a second. He must think Shiro does not notice. And Shiro almost doesn’t- he almost gets his head blown off by a blast of black energy which skims his chest just as he drops Lotor and bends backwards. A second later the energy blasts a wall in half.

About twenty metres away his would-be killer lowers a smoking shoulder-cannon. It’s a massive Galra woman with ears like a bat, and Shiro is briefly torn by his blood-lust and his desire to cuddle her and pet what must be chinchilla-soft fur.  
“Are you alright?” she roars.

Lotor nods wordlessly, still massaging his throat. 

The woman nods curtly to him. When her eyes land on Shiro, her face splits into a crazed grin.

“Get on your knees.” she levels the cannon at him.

Lotor guesses what he’s about to do and cannot get away fast enough. He is helpless when Shiro grabs him about the throat again, this time catching him in the crook of his elbow. 

The woman growls “Let him go! Or I’ll shoot!”

“Go ahead,” Shiro lifts Lotor off his feet again “I have a shield.”

“Prince?”

Lotor’s face is grim “At ease. It’s alright. But I’d be grateful if you would take care of the prisoner down there.” he nods at Thace.

The woman readies her cannon eagerly.

(Now)

Slav finds them about a half hour later on the outskirts of the palace property. As it turns out he was not trapped inside the palace or trapped beneath one of the pieces of exploded Weblum that either smashed into greenish yonder of the plains around the palace or mangled the building itself. There was no need to look for him frantically, as though his lifeblood was pumping from him every second that he was left alone because Slav was chilling in front of the palace with a bunch of locals, surveying the general destruction.

“You two look awful.”

Thace has to stop Shiro from decking him.

“Where the hell were you?” says Shiro in an undertone, not wanting to draw any more stares than two Blade uniforms already draws. 

(Then)

 

Shiro tosses Lotor in front of Thace. Feels like the kid has some wiry strength to him, but certainly not enough to resist being thrown or correct his path in mid-air. So he catches the full fury of the blast, to his stomach, and is promptly torn in half. Shiro is hit by a kind of pulpy salad of insides the colour of grape jelly, and Thace fares about as well as the canvas of a Pollock painting. On the bright side he is already unconscious when the prince’s insides slop over him.

The prince’s body crashes to the floor. Shiro has seen some heinous things since he got to space, and been sprayed with more than his fair share of blood. But this? The prince looks like a gingerbread man got mauled in the side. 

The woman is horrified. She drops her cannon and steps towards the twitching body “Prince?”

Shiro swears to himself in his first language, second language, and finally English. He grabs Thace by the ankle and drags him unceremoniously back, gagging as he sees Thace’s body is leaving a giant purple smear in his wake.

The woman cradles the prince’s head in her lap “Prince? Can you hear me?”

Remarkable how people will talk to the corpses of those they have literally just seen blown to pieces. In the gladiator rings, Shiro once watched a traumatised fighter try to get a conversation out of the severed head of her friend, whose remains had been tossed in earlier for the carnivorous species’ dinner.   
As he scoops Thace onto his shoulders, it occurs to Shiro with a kind of resigned horror that he feels a sense of achievement at having blown the empire’s prince to pieces. Shiro has never seen this jackass before and cannot remember ever hearing about him, but hey, the title ‘princess’ denotes power in space so there is no reason why ‘prince’ should not do the same. Let the Galra try to run their empire with a dead prince.

“Yes, I can hear you.” rasps a wet voice behind Shiro “My ears are still attached to my head, you dolt. That makes the third time you’ve shot me in half in as many years. You’re really quite bad at this.”

(Now)

“Arranging transport!” Slav gestures to a ship parked next to a giant lump of what looks like Weblum intestines “I don’t think we’ll be getting any useful information on this planet, so we’re better off moving along. Last I heard over the kylgarg, Voltron was headed to that newly terraformed system.”

“The one where those idiots actually named the thrice-ringed planet Three Rings?” asks Thace.

“That’s the one!”

“Well we know where not to go.” Shiro glances over his shoulder, in case the guard was determined enough to leap after them “Chasing Voltron’s getting us nowhere. I say we give up on the Thace plan and move forward with Operation Sneaky-Sneak.” 

“I swear to all of the gods, Shiro, I won’t lift a digit to bring that plan to fruition until you change the name.”

“You’re the one who wanted me to name the stupid plans! A, B, C or 1,2,3 wasn’t good enough for you, and now my creative efforts aren’t either, huh? Well fuck you too, Thace. You made me pick a name. The name stays.”

Slav ushers them up the gangplank of the ship. Shiro does not remark upon the unconscious Bagorris guards they have to step over to get onto the gangplank. 

Thace is far too interested in arguing with Shiro to mention them either “I bet that’s what you said to Acxias when you gave him that stupid name. What kind of monster are you, calling a child ‘Keith’? The closest word to his name in our language is ‘Kiith’, and do you know what that means? ‘Toilet paper’. In your infinite wisdom, you named the poor kitten ‘toilet paper’-”

“Well you know what? I didn’t know!” Shiro throws himself down in the co-pilot’s seat as Slav starts to bring the ship’s systems online “I didn’t think about giving him an English name that wouldn’t sound like the alien word for ‘toilet paper’ because back then I didn’t have to worry about shit like that!”

Thace takes the gunner’s seat, should they need fire-power to get off-planet, and swivels at an incredible angle so he can maintain a glare at Shiro “Why of all the names did you have to pick ‘Keith’? That boy trusted you, Shiro, and look at what you did to him.”

“I was a fucking twelve-year-old, alright? Jae-an walks up to me right in the middle of my Saturday cartoons all scared that no one at kindergarten will be able to say his name right because people in Chicago can’t say Korean names or something, and I’m watching Yu-Gi-Oh, I’m not paying attention, I just toss a half-assed suggestion out there! I didn’t think he was gonna take me seriously! It’s painful for me, too, you know, having to live with the fact that I accidentally named my baby brother after Bandit Keith-”

“- you called him ‘toilet paper’! I don’t care what your excuse is! Do you know how the Blade reacted when they heard his name for the first time? We were terrified being raised so far away from one of his cultures would make it hard for him to fit in when he did come back to us, and you had to go and make it worse by naming him ‘toilet paper’!”

Meanwhile Slav has slipped on the pilot’s headset and turned up the volume on the radio chatter, comfortably drowning out the two quibbling men.

“I hope Vakala got my message, or this is going to come as an unpleasant shock.” muses Slav aloud while the raised voices in the back become progressively more high-pitched.

 

(Then)

In that Galra woman’s lap is every nightmare Shiro has ever had since watching ‘Night of the Living Dead’ as a sixteen-year-old. Lotor’s eyes are open and alert, he has pushed himself up onto his elbows and is giving Shiro a look not dissimilar to the one he got the other week when Lance discovered it was Shiro finishing off all the left-overs.

Shiro stares back at him. 

“Zethrid.”

The woman wraps an arm around his shoulders “Yes sir?”

“Did the soldiers get my orders?”

Her face grows dark and excited “Yes sir, the orders are being carried out as we speak.”

Lotor’s smile chills Shiro to his marrow.

“Paladin, go to the porthole of that airlock and tell me what you see. I give you my word you won’t be harmed.”

Shiro cannot think clearly. The animal part of him, the one that kept him alive in the gladiator rings, hears the order and obeys meekly. Shiro’s legs carry him to the airlock and he’s looking out, down at the moon they have just come from. Fire. The planet’s surface is smeared with fire and smoke. Like the eye of a hurricane, the huge, glowing maelstrom has a centre, and Shiro somehow knows what lays in the centre. 

“Remember this, Paladin.” says Lotor at his back “Everywhere you reveal yourself, that will happen. I don’t like doing it. It’s a necessary evil to maintaining the integrity of our plan against Voltron, however, that only one Black Paladin is known to exist. There’s another of you sitting up in the castle now. That itch at the back of your thin skull? That’s him. He’s programmed to detonate at the sight of you, the sound of your voice. Any inkling of your continued existence will prime him and from that moment it’s only a matter of time until he, well,” Shiro looks back to Lotor as Lotor gestures down at his own mangled torso “More of this sort of unpleasant thing.”

Shiro turns and runs. Lotor’s voice follows him down the hall, strained and gleeful.

“See how far you get, Champion!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, yeah, that's my head-canon as to how 'Keith' came to be called Keith. Just so we're all on the same page, Keith's got three names in this fic: Keith, Jae-an and Acxias 
> 
> (I understand it's annoying to be constantly asked for your "English" name, or asked if your actual name is your English name and there's just a whole mess of weirdness in general when you've got a mutli-cultural name or names. Take it from someone with one Arabic name, two Latina names and an American surname. The way you introduce yourself should be the way you are addressed as far as anyone is concerned. Even so I still think the multiple names thing provides an interesting angle to explore Keith's mixed heritage)


	7. “I am the master of self-care.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For max effect in the first season, I recommend listening to 'Wish you were here' while reading. So how about that Season 4, huh? When will Hunk's character development come back from the war?

Shiro is on the front-porch. He’s got a beer in one hand and a piece of gauze in the other, pressing it over the fresh tattoo on his wrist. Through the kitchen window, Keith watches his brother. His hands are sunk into dish-water and pursue stray utensils with a scrubber. The heat of the day is still trapped inside the walls and the floor, making the panelling beneath Keith’s feet unpleasantly warm. Pink Floyd crackles out of the ancient radio.  
Shiro has a special trick for finding a particular song on the radio. He’ll roam through the bandwidths broadcasting across the desert, drift in and out of the Garrison HQ’s stations, into the conservative talk-shows and out again, picking up a distant whisper of NPR, until, impossibly, he finds a station that has just begun ‘Wish you were here’. Each time the opening chords of the song are strummed he laughs in Keith’s incredulous face and calls himself an X-man. 

It is a truly eerie talent. He finds a different station almost every time, so it’s not as if he is just tuning into a broadcast entirely devoted to that one smash-hit of Pink Floyd’s. Keith often does wonder if Shiro is a mutant. It would be a weirdly specific power to have, out of all the powers anyone could have. And it is only really useful for a tiring night like this one, coming at the end of the interminable day they spent waiting to find out if Shiro was going to Kerebos.   
Now that the news has come the song could not be more appropriate.

“…cold comfort for change…” wheezes the radio.

Keith flicks the last of the dishwater from his hands and heads out onto the porch. He is still in his Garrison uniform from the waist down- he tore his shirt off the moment they went from the car to the desert heat. Shiro smiles at him and pats the porch beside him. When Keith obliges he peels the gauze from his wrist and allows Keith to stare.  
Keith has been staring all day and still cannot get it into his head that the tattoo is permanent. That his name is recorded over Shiro’s veins from this day forward.

“It looks tacky. People are gonna think I’m your ex.”

Shiro rolls his eyes “No they won’t. Everybody knows I haven’t had time to date since I was twenty. It’s Hangul, anyway, not like most people can read that.”

“Sorry.”

“Hey, I’d rather raise you well than date.” Shiro passes him the beer bottle “And of course I say this seconds before condoning some under-age drinking.”

“Who am I gonna tell?” Keith takes a cautious swig. The taste is horrific, of course, because beer is a disgusting thing in general and he has no idea why Shiro likes it, let alone why he thinks occasionally offering Keith some is a nice thing to do. 

Shiro takes the bottle back and leans back on his elbows, titling his head up to the ceiling. He sighs deeply and curls up on his side, staring at Keith with tired eyes “Are you sure you want me to go?”

“Well, yeah! This is what you’ve worked for!”

“No, it’s not what I worked for.”

“You didn’t need two PhD’s to raise me.”

“You don’t know what they taught me in advanced mathematics.” Shiro yawns and gazes fondly at his raw wrist “I think this will be good for me, but I’m not sure if it will be good for you.”

Keith catches his hand and squeezes it “My abandonment issues aren’t that bad.”  
He says this while a cold knot forms in his gut. The thought of having to move through his life, through the daily rituals of school and interacting with other humans, sans Shiro, the safety net, makes him want to crawl underneath his bed in the back-room of the cabin.

“Well, whatever happens, you know I’m coming back, right?”

Keith moves to pull his hand away but Shiro won’t let go of him. He hangs onto his little brother and stares at him in a way Keith cannot remember anyone ever looking at him, since his father left.

“I know.” he says a little hoarsely. 

“And you know I love you?”

“Gay.” he mumbles.

Shiro laughs, letting go of him “I know you are, but what am I?”

 

Keith wakes up with a smile on his face. The world seems immaterial, unconvincing as he opens his eyes and rubs the sleep away. The smile fades from his face as he remembers what happened- how he ended up asleep on the table. Shortly after Voltron returned, half in triumph, half in utter confusion, Keith collapsed on the nearest piece of furniture for a nap. Flying Boss Ma’am is more and more exhausting each time he does it. As if it was not difficult enough to bear the burden of piloting her intimidating ass around and acting as the leader of Voltron, now he has an entirely new thing to worry about- she might not eject him like she did Shiro, but teleport randomly even if they are in a situation where that is absolutely the last thing he wants to do.  
Great. Sometimes he wants to kick Alfor in the Altean equivalent of the nards for making the most powerful weapon in the universe a series of co-dependent, grumpy, in-cooperative cats. The fate of the universe literally depends on Keith and the others’ ability to herd cats. If Alfor had gone with another, friendlier and more impressionable animal like dogs or hippos, Voltron wouldn’t be quite so stressful to fly. But at this rate Keith is going to end up greyer than Shiro within the year.

Keith sits up and twists a kink out of his back. Somebody put a blanket over him when it became apparent he was not going to get off the table any time soon. Probably Hunk. The lights have been dimmed, but not turned off so he has enough light by which to move about without bumping into everything. He checks his phone for the time and is dismayed to see he has slept for the better part of seven hours. Wonderful leadership. Ditch the team ten minutes into a highly sensitive personal mission, fuck up said personal mission, come back and fall asleep on the kitchen table before the team can plan out the next move.   
On the bright side he didn’t fall asleep without changing out of his armour. 

“I am the master of self-care.” says Keith miserably to himself. As he steps off the table, he discovers his right leg has fallen asleep and ends up doing a funny sort of combination between the splits and a face-plant. 

“Keith?” Lance pops his head around the door, his eyes strangely luminous in the gloom “You ok?”

“I am fine.” Keith rights himself “Why?”

“You did just sleep on the table for seven hours.”

“It’s called self-care, Lance.”

Lance rolls his eyes. The colour is really quite hypnotising. Where did that colour come from? Is it a common colour in Cuba, or did is it a genetic surprise from some far-flung Scandinavian ancestor? Maybe not that far-flung, actually, considering Lance referred to himself as ‘mixed-race’ the other day. For the sheer amount of time they’ve spent together Keith knows a shockingly little amount of information about Lance. Are both his parents ethnically Cuban? Or does that Scottish-sounding surname indicate an ethnically Scottish parent out of the pair? Maybe he has more than two parents. Maybe a step-father or step-mother along with his biological parents, assuming he even has both of his biological parents in his life, assuming anything about anything.   
Keith caught one brief glimpse of Lance’s family in that mind-meld training, but he was so distracted by the intense waves of emotional distress coming off of Hunk, the ferocity with which Pidge was trying to keep them all out of her head, he barely knows what he got a look at. Either it was Lance’s family or it was a picture of the Kennedy Assassination. He is sure it is one of the two, though why it would be the second one, he has no idea.

Keith shuffles over to the next room and sees his team has not wandered very far. Lance was apparently just sitting on the floor to make use of the one outlet Pidge has not commandeered for her complicated set-up, pecking diligently away at his laptop. Pidge is asleep on the floor with her face sandwiched into the keyboard of her laptop. The soft light of a dozen dozing computer screen gives her an ethereal light. Shadows of her eyelashes climb her forehead in great spines, making her look angry and fragile at the same time. Hunk is no longer there, but his laptop is, along with the spiral notepad he uses to hold his notes. The pages are open on a series of neat diagrams which seem to be outlining a strategy to liberate a nearby occupied system.   
Allura is face-down on the couch under a blanket. Apparently all Alteans typically sleep on their stomachs as a necessity of survival- laying on their back does something uncomfortable to their innards, which are arranged in an inconvenient way. She was freaked out by the revelation that humans preferred to sleep on their backs, especially the breast-equipped. He quickly retreats, grabs his blanket and spreads it over Pidge, easing the computer out from under her face. Pidge opens her eyes briefly and swears at him under her breath. He guides her onto the couch and covers her again when she slumps over and begins to snore.

Then, exhausted himself, he squeezes onto the couch beside Allura and sinks back into the cushiony depths. Sensing someone is close, Allura rolls onto her side and wriggles about until she has found Keith’s leg with her forehead and made a pillow of it. 

He begins to fiddle with Allura’s hair and twists a lock of hair around his forefinger. “What are you up to?”

Lance swivels his laptop around to show Keith a screen busy with the various communication channels of the Coalition “Talking with a couple of Coalition officers. You know Beezer was promoted to a lieutenant the other week? I’ve got Rolo, Nyma and Shay on the horn right now- poor Shay, man, her digits are too damn big for the little keyboard on her communicator. It just took her a full two minutes to tell me she was settling into her new unit alright over by Semafore. The suspense, man, the suspense.”

“Did Pidge figure anything out?”

Lance shrugs “Not quite. There’s a lot of information to sort through, so she set up some programmes to run through the files and ping ones with keywords. ‘Prisoner’, ‘captive’, ‘human’, ‘the Splinter’, ‘Marmora’ and ‘Voltron’. It looks like most of what we got is information on weapons production. The moon was completely automated as of last year, if you can believe it. The munitions were getting sent out by remote pods. Looks like a unit from the folks on Three-Rings come over every few weeks to make sure the factory’s programmes are all still running the way they should, but that’s it.”

Keith’s stomach sinks “Ah. So…so we could start tracking down former staff-members of the moon. The moon’s databases should have information about where they were transferred out to. Some of them must have just gone over to Three-Rings, we could go back there. They didn’t even put up a fight today.”

“Yesterday.” corrects Lance.

“We must have hurt the empire a little bit, at least. Pidge wrecked their database, you and Al wrecked everything else.”

“Yeah. They’ll have a few less robot sentries for you to behead.”

Keith laughs, softly, so as not to wake up Allura. It makes his gut watery as Lance looks up and smiles at him. Is it his imagination, or is that a different smile than Lance’s normal? A little less smug. A little more intimate and genuine.   
Before Keith slips up and says something stupid, he changes the subject “I just had the most weirdly vivid dream. It was like I was reliving this memory I have of the day Shiro found out he was going to Kerebos.”

“Oh yeah? I bet you guys went out to celebrate.”

He shakes his head “Nah, we just went out to the cabin in the desert, uh, where I was living, when you guys met me. Honestly, we just sat around the shack and ate every kind of Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream there was- the lactose free versions, I mean. I would have died otherwise. And we watched all these movies from the early 2000’s and the 10’s. ‘The Iron Giant’ and ‘Treasure Planet’ and ‘Moana’, twice in a row. It was kind of ridiculous. It was months before Shiro actually left the planet, but we still had all these half-finished tubs of ice cream stacked up in the freezer. I was still eating them when I found out he was missing. The most exciting thing that happened that day was Shiro got a tattoo. As soon as he heard he went out and got my name tattooed on his wrist in Hangul.”

Lance smothers a laugh with his fist, his eyes wide “Wait, wait, really? Shiro? Shiro got your name tattooed on him? How come I’ve never seen it?”

“Well it’s on the arm he lost.”

Lance’s face falls “Oh. Christ, sorry. I ran into that one.”

“It’s alright.” Keith busies his hands in Allura’s hair again “How did Allura do on the moon?”

“Oh, she was great. She’s just about as good as the rest of us now. I mean, she flies like an idiot sometimes, but I think the fact that she’s flying like an idiot is just proof that she’s getting into the right Paladin mind-set.”

Keith looks down at her and smiles with a naked fondness he would not normally risk, except that it is dark and everyone is asleep aside from Lance. 

“Hey,” Lance lowers the screen of his laptop just enough to take the glare off his face. In the gloom, he is tired and insubstantial, and if Keith did not already know Lance was there he might mistake his shape for a shadow “Listen, I know you didn’t mean to teleport today, but…but it scared the shit out of me. So, I don’t know, if there’s a way you can talk to Boss and maybe get them to be a little less…impulsive?”

“’Shitty’ is the word you’re looking for.”

“Yeah. Shitty.” says Lance shortly.

“The team got by without me.”

Lance shakes his head and aims his eyes at the ground “It still freaked us out. My hands wouldn’t stop shaking the entire time we were fighting-”

A sudden bang in the hall outside makes them both jump violently. Allura is startled awake too and lifts her head in time to see Shiro breeze past the doorway. But he quickly doubles back and leans on the doorframe, his head lowered, his face obscured by his hair. Allura looks quizzically up at Keith.

“You asleep again, Shiro?” Lance folds his laptop shut and goes to the door, taking Shiro by the shoulder “We’re gonna have to start putting you in a straitjacket before you go to bed.”

“I’m listening.” mumbles Shiro.

“Your species is so freaky.” says Allura “I cannot believe you don’t stop thinking when you fall asleep. If an Altean got up and walked around in their sleep, we would assume they had contracted a brain parasite and take them to a healing pod immediately.”

Of course this is exactly what Allura did the first couple of times she caught Shiro sleep-walking. She was horrified by how nonchalant the Paladins were about the fact that Shiro was moving, walking, talking and occasionally eating, all without conscious control of his own body. Not that it isn’t creepy to have Shiro thumping around in the small hours. Several times, Shiro has slept-walked into a Paladin’s room and either stood over them or, in Hunk and Keith’s case, got right in bed with them. He almost gave Coran a heart-attack last week when he materialised behind the Altean while he was making some repairs to the bridge, crouched silently and asked Coran if he wanted a sandwich. War veteran though he is, Coran never been more startled by the sudden appearance of a hulking shadow at his feet.

Keith can only shrug “It’s just what he does when he gets stressed out. He can’t really help it. He bottles up all his stress when he’s awake, so it finds other ways to come out.”

“What if he suddenly re-establishes a connection with Boss Ma’am and flies out, and he doesn’t even know he’s done it? Perhaps Lance is right. I’ll see about some kind of restraint for his door. We can’t go losing him again.”

“Yeah, we really can’t.”  
Yesterday Hunk suggested to him that they might implant a sneaky, non-invasive tracker on Shiro just in case he decided to go missing again. Shiro didn’t need to know, to spare him his dignity, and Keith has to admit the prospect of knowing where Shiro is the next time he disappears helped him sleep a little easier last night. On the table. 

Allura gets off of him at last “Well, now that I’m awake, I might as well get something done. Keith?”  
She gestures in the general direction of the bridge.

But he has already laid on his back and knocked out cold.

“Fair enough.” Allura spreads the blanket over him “Sleep well, mighty leader.”


	8. “He said fucking ‘yoink’.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok, the university year has finished down in Australia, so hopefully it won't take me months in between updates anymore!

Second to battle, evacuations are, without a doubt, the most hated responsibility of Voltron’s. Often an evacuation ends up as a kind of battle because the only reason for Voltron to be directly involved in something as routine as an evacuation is because the imperial Galra have arrived to take prisoners and make trouble, or because there’s some other sort of outlandish threat that won’t suffer to be removed until a giant robot made of cats interferes. Odd, how often that seems to happen. Add to that the fact that evacuations will always be a special kind of hell for the sheer amount of sentient beings that are being relocated, these days transporting items of immense cultural value should the empire be tempted to burn what they find already abandoned, and it becomes like a road-trip where the destination is only an urgent desire to be the hell out of the way.   
Today’s theatre of battle is a charming little asteroid known as Klello, the gem in the rocky belt of its larger mother planet and on the verge of fiery destruction thanks to possibly the universe’s first recorded case of a ‘revenge volcano’.

Klello is no stranger to a bit of terraforming- no decent society was ever founded upon an asteroid without some help from terraforming tech, especially in as precarious an orbit as the one Klello follows about the mid-section of its mother-planet Phosphoricaria. Therefore no one questioned the sudden appearance of a new peak on the horizon. The environmental management department figured it was something new from the tourism committee, and vice versa. It was not until the rumblings began a week ago that some intrepid resident put forwards the idea of actually checking if any of the bureaucracies had installed a mountain, possibly an active volcano, inconveniently near to the asteroid’s only major population centre. When the mountain was discovered to be a piece of Galra subterfuge the evacuation began and a call was put through to Voltron for some help.

Allura and Guapa are stationed in the town, using the ice-gun to shoot down the occasional piece of flaming shrapnel that gets spat out by the volcano. It is not quite ready to erupt. Much like the gut of a lactose intolerant person whose body is about to betray them in the worst possible way, the volcano warns of the impending doom with puffs of noxious gas and odious rumblings. There was a very close call with a fireball that was on such a dramatic parabola that Allura couldn’t get a bead on where to fire, but luckily, Hunk worked it out before her and managed to stop the projectile by shoving Kitty’s face in the way.   
Allura really doesn’t know what is going on with Hunk. Sometimes he’s expertly recalibrating the ancient engines of the castle he has had only seven months to study, the next moment he’s headbutting rocks out of the sky. She chalks it up to a consequence of the staggering lack of survival instinct among humans. Even the smartest of them, like Hunk, will take the chance to stick their faces in the bubbling cauldron of a volcano to see if lava is really as hot as it looks. 

“You know who would love this?” says Hunk, practically nose-first in the lava at this point. Allura can only just see Kitty’s tail whipping back in forth to keep their altitude up. “Edgy. He loves fire. Lance, not so much. But if K got back in Edgy’s cockpit and they had to work with a revenge-volcano, they’d love it.”

“You seem to be enjoying it.”

“Oh, yeah, of course! I always wondered if lava’s as hot as it looks.”

Another rumble of warning from the volcano. A ripple goes through the town, shaking the buildings, the people swaying in the streets like grass in a wind. Allura tightens her hand about the control to the ice-gun “And is it?”

“Hotter.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have your face in it.”

“How many chances am I gonna have to stick my face in a volcano? When I lived in Samoa, my grandfolks never even let me go to Upolu or Savai’i in case their volcanoes went off. I mean, it was super unlikely, but you try telling that to my grandma.”

“You won’t have a chance to do anything if it erupts in your face. I’ll have to invent a heroic death for you too, Hunk, because I cannot bring back your charred corpse back to Lance and tell him you had your face in a fucking volcano and the natural thing happened.”

Hunk laughs “Alright, I’m gonna jam a big rock in here. It’s gonna wreak all kinds of hell on the pressure, I think, but it’s better than blocking the lava floe with my corpse. I don’t really know what’s going on with physics on this planet. But hey, jamming huge rocks in huger problems usually works.”

“Is that an Earth proverb or did you pull it out of your ass?”

“It can be both of those things. Hang tight. I’m gonna find a rock. Screech if you need me.”

 

On the far side of Klello’s mother planet, Shiro is in the middle of an entirely different kind of screeching. The soft, rage-drenched stage-whisper he has perfected from years of quietly chewing out Keith in public. Shiro has taken advantage of the relative quiet to take himself down to Boss Ma’ams hangar and use some foul language he has prohibited himself from using for many months now. He has considered picking up Hunk’s spanner and putting a few new dents in Ma’ams bodywork, but she probably wouldn’t stand for that. And as angry as he is Shiro doesn’t really want to hurt his lion.   
He just wants to know why she is hurting him.

Tired, defeated and depleted of curses, Shiro sits on the ground in front of Ma’ams paws. He is not ashamed to find he has cried a little. Better to cry in private than to randomly burst into tears in front of his kids because he’s bottled it all up for too long. 

“I just don’t get you.” he rasps “You are honestly the most frustrating, unfathomable, uncooperative thing I have ever met. And I fucking raised Keith.”

Boss Ma’am lowers her massive head to her paws. Her nose is now within arm’s reach- inviting Shiro to give her some affection. Instead Shiro scoots backwards.

He turns his eyes to the ground “No. I don’t want to make nice. I just want you to tell me what’s going on with you. Or me. Which one of us is fucking this up? Or are we just not supposed to be flying together? I don’t know what the fuck’s going on, Bossy, you have to give me something to go on.”

She inches forwards and again invites him to pat her on the snout. Shiro shakes his head “You want affection. I want to be useful to Voltron again. I guess we’re both gonna have to learn to cope with disappointment, huh?”

 

It takes Lance less than ten minutes once they make it planet-side on Phosphoricaria to make a new friend, which breaks his record. The new friend is a little alien child who managed, as children are wont to do in times of incredible crisis, to wander off from her parents on the evacuation vehicle. She kept a cool head, though, and remembered her training to find a responsible looking adult should she be lost at an inopportune moment. She quickly picked his Paladin armour out of the crowd and made him aware of her plight. 

Lance directs the traffic of the evacuees from the bottom of the gangplank, his little side-kick balanced on a hip. At some point her parents are going to have to walk by and will undoubtedly spot their progeny hanging off the Red Paladin.  
All the refugees have the same questions and concerns- what will they do about the volcano, what is going to become of them, when can they go back to collect the rest of their property from Klello? Lance just hopes Hunk and Allura have an idea of how to defuse this situation. Voltron should be able to reverse a natural disaster. Ignoring the fact that itself Voltron is, more often than not, something like a natural disaster.

The alien girl taps her knuckles absently against the outside of his helmet. She scans the crowd for her parents, but is secretly hoping they will take a while to show up. How often will she get the chance to hang with a Paladin? And how many kids in the world get to say they did so?

Lance turns to her “How you doing, champ?”

“I’m fine.”

“You sure you don’t want to sit up in the castle?” but before he can offer to find her parents himself, she is shaking her head emphatically and tightening her grip about his shoulder. 

It’s really better that he doesn’t move from this spot- he has completely lost track of Pidge, which is easy, considering that Lance could fit her into his pocket. He should stay where he is until Pidge makes a reappearance. Besides, it gives the evacuees some measure of comfort to see a Paladin of Voltron helping with the evacuation effort, however small that help is. And anyway, Keith asked him to stay on the gangplank of the castle while he had a talk with the officials in this city, incidentally, the capitol of Phosphoricaria. Hunk and Allura could need back-up at any moment and it is best Lance remains nearby so he can get ready quickly. The real test is of his willpower. How long will he last before the familiar weight of a child hanging off him makes him cry? 

Pidge, meanwhile, is dashing through the crowded streets just as fast as her adorable little legs can carry her. She is not quite sure she should be doing this alone. It would have been better to alert Lance to the situation and get his help in chasing down this jackass that has just stolen her bayard right off her belt. At least eighty percent of Lance is just legs and he’s fast to boot- faster than Allura, even, when there’s a space-cockroach in the room.   
So Pidge is alone, thanking a god she has only just begun to consider might exist that her size also makes her light-weight and therefore capable of an impressive speed when she really wants to run. 

It happened just a moment earlier. She didn’t get a good look at the guy because she had been directing a couple of evacuees towards the community centre when he hit her, but the glimpse she caught of his retreating back puts him at about 6 ft 2 inches, maybe 200 pounds. In short a total beefcake. Not that Pidge hasn’t wasted opponents more than three times her size before in bare-handed combat. He looked humanoid, which is always eerie, and he moved in an oddly human way that suggests the thief of her bayard might be an Altean.   
She plans to find those things out as soon as she catches up and rips off his mask.

“Make a hole, people!” she shouts for maybe the tenth time.

She needn’t screech at all, actually, the way the crowd parts in front of her. Evacuees, locals and officials alike all plaster themselves to the sides of buildings and flood into side-roads to get out of her way. Her helmet is off; the look on her face is fierce. She can only just see the man visiting this fresh hell upon her. He’s got a good eighty metre lead on her and he’s holding it steady. He’s wearing a light-weight black suit of armour that reminds her vaguely of what Marmora wears, but it doesn’t make sense that an agent of Marmora would be attacking her. Maybe an enemy of Voltron would dress up as one to get close to her but this guy never made any real attempt to get close to her. He just mingled with the crowd, got within snatching distance, purloined her bayard and now he’s running like all the fiends of hell are on his tail. 

Lucky for him the terrain is fairly even. Phosphoricaria is a flat planet. Must have the worlds’ laziest tectonic plates, because there’s barely a hill to speak of let alone a mountain range, and it shows in their cities. The streets run straight and true for at least a mile ahead with dozens of alleyways branching off in all directions. If Pidge loses sight of him for even one second he could well duck her, the way he’s been trying to, by getting off into one of the narrow alleys and taking as many turns as it comes into his head to make. Pidge could spend days navigating this vast, pin-rolled network of streets and never find so much as a clue to where he has gone. Which is why her only chance is to catch up to him. 

He turns into one of the many alleys. Pidge doesn’t slow her momentum as she follows him down the alley, so ends up ramming her shoulder into one of the low brick-like walls so hard she can hear the impact inside her skull. But she keeps going. People are far thinner on the ground here, thank god, because while the thief is fine with weaving around them Pidge has got to the point where she’s prepared to body-slam anybody who remains in her way.   
Her lungs have turned into twin fires in her chest. She has never been good at running for long-distances. Not this fast either- it must be sheer adrenaline and spite keeping her on her feet.

Pidge takes a deep breath and inflates her burning chest in a scream “Stop!”

It doesn’t work, but it causes him to glance over his shoulder. Seeing that she is gaining on him, the thief puts on a burst of speed that carries him around another corner. Seconds later Pidge crashes shoulder-first into another wall, just in time to see him fling a door open and flee into a house. The occupants are perturbed to have a masked figure pursued by a Paladin burst into their house, to say the least. The thief jumps over a child playing on a weird fur rug and makes a sharp turn for the rough wooden ladder that serves as the Phosphoricarian version of a stair-case. He’s at the top of it before Pidge’s feet have touched the bottom rung. 

“Stop, dammit! It won’t work for anyone but me-” Pidge stops talking afraid she might vomit from effort. She makes it to the second floor and catches a glimpse of the thief disappearing through an open window, presumably onto the ledge. 

Pidge pokes her head around the window. She isn’t worried about the man having a weapon. At this point, with her insides liquefying and her lungs burning to shreds of ashy flesh in her ribs, she would gladly take a laser to the face if only she could rest for a few moments. The thief has climbed onto the roof and is poking at some device on his wrist. Either a communicator or a remote calling a get-away ship.

“Goddamn you,” Pidge grasps at the edge of the grassy roof “I’m gonna rip your fucking legs off and stuff ‘em down your goddamn throat.” 

The thief looks down at her. Even with the mask making his face inscrutable, Pidge detects a note of surprise that she is still going.

She heaves herself up onto the roof belly-first and kicks her way towards the man, intending to grab an ankle and bite, as he backs up to the extreme edge on the other side. A pale head pops out of a downstairs window. One of the occupants starts to film what’s happening on their handheld.

“Drop the bayard and I might let you keep whatever your species’ version of a dick is!” Pidge wheezes.

The man shakes his head. Weird how that gesture has translated into so many alien cultures. Or maybe it’s a gesture of surrender to him. Whatever it means, Pidge gets up on all fours, still going forwards, still intending to bite the shit out of his ankle. 

From the steady air-traffic overhead, a modest commuter ship descends to hover over the roof. A winch unfurls from its belly, which the man grabs and wraps around his wrist just as Pidge gets within lunging distance. He is quickly lifted out of reach and sucked back into the ship via the winch before Pidge can even start to swear. A second later the ship has melded into the streams of air-traffic and the thief is gone completely, along with her bayard.

“Pidge!” 

Weakly, she turns her head to the side. Keith has come up over the edge of the roof almost as flushed as she is.

“What the hell was that? I saw you go tearing past- you nearly elbowed me into a gutter. What’s wrong?”

“Fucker took my bayard.”

Keith is so confused it’s kind of adorable. He kneels at her side and pulls her up into a sitting position, only to have her slump over on him, exhausted “I said, the fucker took my bayard.”

Keith pats her on the back “Did you get it back?”

“No. Shit, no.” 

“We’ll get it back! It doesn’t matter. You can use mine the Black Bayard. I’ll make Boss Ma’am understand. I can just use my knife.” 

Then Pidge delivers the punchline “When he took the bayard off my belt, he said ‘yoink’.” 

Keith falters “He what?”

“He said fucking ‘yoink’.”

 

In the ship that has just conveyed the thief and his prize away, Shiro strips off the borrowed mask and collapses towards the nearest chair. He misses it, in fact, and ends up spread-eagled on the vibrating floor. He thrusts the bayard in Thace’s outstretched hands and wheezes “She got taller. The little shit- it’s only been like a month and she’s getting into her next growth spurt without me there. I think I’m gonna throw up.”

Slav twists around in the pilot’s chair “No, please don’t do that!”

Shiro curls up around his burning middle “Don’t tell me what to do.”  
Damn was Pidge fast. He’s never seen her move so fast before. Then again, rarely has he ever seen her so radiantly, gloriously enraged before. Shiro is not sure if he should feel the sense of achievement he does feel at having out-run her. The odds were stacked in his favour. He had the advantage of surprise, height and of having a route planned out in his head. Pidge had to barrel blindly after him and still did such a good job of it she almost caught him.

It took all of his might not to spin around in mid-chase and shout “I’m so proud of you!”

Slav heads for the edge of the atmosphere. The traffic is neatly divided into two streams, though, really, the inbound traffic is more like an over-flowing river at this point. Most of Klello is coming in, anticipating an eruption and a resulting gas-cloud that will make the comet unliveable for however long it takes for the environmental management council to get its shit together. The number of people heading off-planet, towards the inter-planetary station just outside of the atmosphere, is down to a trickle. Hopefully the Paladins won’t have enough time to organise a search of the out-bound passengers, what, with the flood of evacuees needing help on Phosphoricaria and the geological crisis up on Klello. 

Once the immediate threat of vomit has passed, Thace helps Shiro get strapped into a chair and takes up the shot-gun, stashing the bayard in a compartment beneath his seat. Ever since Shiro pinched it from Pidge the bayard has been dead and dark. Not unlike trying to get his own bayard to work, he thinks. Well if the bayard doesn’t want to respond to him that means there is still a good chance the rest of Voltron is similarly uncooperative with the other version of him. Kuro, as Shiro has mentally dubbed him.   
Kuro is an old joke between him and Keith. Whenever food went missing from the fridge or a chore was left half-finished and neither one of them were willing to own up, the blame was assigned to Shiro’s evil twin. When you’re a guy with a name like ‘Shiro’ it stands to reason there’s an alternate version of you with diabolical intentions named ‘Kuro’. Shiro wonders how long it will take the Paladins to catch on.

If it was difficult not to congratulate Pidge for her enthusiastic pursuit, it was absolute torment not to rip off his mask and explain everything to her. No doubt she still would have shocked the hell out of him for making her run so hard. What makes it so much worse is that Shiro is 90% sure they passed Keith at some point. Of course it is entirely possible he just imagined that little glimpse of his baby brother. It was a nerve-wracking chase, he was terrified of what it would mean for Voltron if Pidge caught him (death, instantaneous death by a bomb that looks like him) and it was really hard to see through that mask. So, for now, he will write-off the scrap of red and mullet he caught out of the corner of his eye as an illusion- a consequence of his desperate need to see his nerd brother and tell him he’s doing a good job.

Shiro is so caught up in trying to process what he has just done that it takes him a moment to realise Thace is talking to him. Scolding him, actually, which is Thace’s go-to conversation starter these days “Really I wish you had let me go, or one of our other agents. If Pidge had caught you, gods forbid, there would have been no excuse to get you out of that situation. If Pidge had caught a Marmora agent? Well, tough luck for them, but we would have been able to come up with some excuse and transport them to an outer-system to lay low until everything is resolved.”

“I know.” says Shiro patiently.

“And another thing- I don’t like you risking yourself like this. I understand it’s frustrating to be separated from your kittens while your copy sits up in the castle, but there’s no reason to risk death like that.”

“I wasn’t risking death, Thace.” Shiro closes his eyes and sinks back into his chair “I knew what I was doing.”

“Did you?”

“Yes I did. How many times do you want me to say it?”

“I just wonder if it was necessary for you to take the risk, or if you just wanted to see them.”

“You’re acting like I went in there to catch up with Pidge over a mug of leaf juice. I didn’t. I stole her bayard and ran like hell. Can we not get into this? In fact, just consider me dead for the moment. This is my corpse in the chair. I can’t contribute in any meaningful way so you’re better off not engaging me at all.”

“Oh, that’ll make a change.” 

“Maybe we should all be quiet?” suggests Slav with the air of a beleaguered parent three hours deep in a hellish road-trip “No need for conversation! In fact, we’ll all be much fresher for it when we get to Trigel. How about that?”

Thace shrugs. But when he looks over to Shiro for confirmation, Shiro is already asleep.


	9. "Nobody likes an intergalactic war, Trigel."

(About 9,995 decaphoebs ago)

It is deep into the night-cycle of the planet by the time Blaytz and Thace return from the dry-run relocation. They had promised Trigel it would not be too long past the midpoint of the planet’s day cycle, but Trigel paced and worried on and on through the interminable hours of this nameless little mining asteroid until she had seriously begun to walk herself through the contingency plan for hiding blue, in case they really were dead. Just as Trigel has begun to gather her things for the cockpit of the spare ship, she hears the siren go, announcing the arrival of another ship into what should be an abandoned outpost. She runs to the security feeds and nearly faints with relief as she recognises Blaytz and Thace’s ship nearing the launch-pad. 

Trigel runs up a story and mashes the digit-reader on the outside lock impatiently. It opens on a surprised Thace who screams a little bit as she throws herself at him. Trigel doesn’t blame him. Even in the five decaphoebs of this terrible war with Zarkon, she has never been terribly emotional about their situation. Certainly not so much so that she initiates unnecessary physical contact- affectionate, even. It is entirely possible Thace thinks she is about to bite his throat out.

But when he realises Trigel is after a hug rather than his double-jugular, he pats her awkwardly on the back “Sorry we’re so late. We almost flew straight into a battle.”

Trigel lets go of him “This far out? Between whom?”

“Didn’t get a good look.” this is Blaytz, who is having trouble negotiating his massive frame in and out of a cockpit which was designed for and by a much slimmer species. Thace retreats to help his partner get unstuck “But at least a third of them were Altean ships.”

Trigel winces “They’re still going.”

“Down to the last child, it looks like.”

By all rights the Altean forces should have scattered a long time ago. Their royals have been almost completely exterminated. Alfor was killed quite publicly and dramatically almost three phoebs earlier when Zarkon made an attempt to destroy his war-castle. Given that it was totally empty, Trigel has no idea why he would have fought so viciously to defend it from Zarkon while the castle took itself away to the coordinates Alfor had set for it. It’s entirely possible that is where Alfor has stashed the Black Lion, but it’s difficult to know. He wouldn’t tell any of the rest of them. He always said it was a matter for him and Zarkon alone. Alfor hadn’t been the same man since his daughter disappeared, taking with her that omnipresent nanny-advisor. He would not allow the other Paladins to know where he put the war-castle, nor would he suffer to be asked how he was bearing up under the death of his daughter.   
Since the Empress had died and made him, by default, both the Emperor and the commander of the Altean military forces, the strain had begun to crack Alfor. Even before Zarkon killed him Alfor was falling apart at the seams and could barely get his military from one day to the next. Frankly, Trigel considers it a testament to the Altean sense of duty that the military has gone on as long as it has. Other peoples would have dissolved their forces, returned to their families and run the hell away by now- probably a wiser decision, come to think of it.

“Did you recognise any of the ships? Any officer we know?”

“We weren’t that close,” Blaytz ushers them into the base “But I don’t think so. There aren’t many people left whom we would know, are there?”

“Thanks for bringing the mood up.” says Thace with a tired grin.

Blaytz mumbles something apologetic and puts an arm around his partner’s waist. It makes Trigel smile a little. Strange how many of the Paladins found time to cultivate their personal lives while they were battling for the fate of the universe. Alfor had already been the royal consort when Trigel first met him, long before Voltron was even a crazed glint in Alfor’s eyes. Zarkon married Honerva as she engineered Voltron and not too long after Blaytz announced that he was dating the servant that Zarkon had once told him not to fraternise with on the night Voltron’s original ore hit Daibazaal. And Blaytz’s way of announcing that was to waltz into Zarkon’s castle, sweep Thace off his feet and shout ‘yoink!’ as he showed himself out.   
Trigel has never been particularly interested in finding herself a partner or partners. If it wasn’t an issue of having to defend the universe from the things that kept trying to destroy it, it would have been something else. Gyrgan was the same. It got to the point where they were calling themselves ‘the spinsters club’. Whenever he got more than one drink in him, he would put his head in Trigel’s lap and suggest earnestly that they could get married if they were both still single by the time the decaphoeb was over. 

Gyrgan is dead now. None of them are quite sure how- he simply disappeared during a battle about a decaphoeb ago, and no matter how hard Trigel and Blaytz searched, they couldn’t find a single trace of their friend or the ship he had crashed in. The yellow lion remained inert in a hangar of Alfor’s castle for a long time, unwilling to even talking to her sister (and brother) lions, until it became apparent that Voltron was not going to have the occasion to form again any time soon. So the yellow lion was hidden away. Perhaps this was what she had wanted all along- to be left to her own devices, to be ignored by the universe that had snatched her Paladin away and digest the grief in her own time.   
The green lion has also been tucked away. Trigel hid her on a leafy planetoid with plenty of interesting flora and fauna for her to observe. The dominant species there had just begun to develop a rudimentary sewer system when Trigel hid her. With any luck, by the time the green lion is disturbed the species will be working on space-flight. The longer the green lion is left alone seems the better to Trigel. 

The red lion is gone too. All that is left to hide now is the blue lion, and Blaytz and Thace seem satisfied with the location they have scouted out for this purpose. 

“How soon do you want to move the blue?” prompts Trigel “I can be ready quickly. The faster we do this, the better.”

Thace and Blaytz exchange one of those frustrating, inscrutable looks that only people who have been conspiring together for a long time are capable of. Trigel feels both of her hearts sink. This cannot be good.

“What?”

“You know Thace and I don’t expect to survive this, right?”

Trigel relaxes a little. Is that all they were worried about?  
“Neither do I. I know the risks just as well as you do.”

“Better, I’m sure. But that’s not the issue. Trigel, I think you should stay behind.”

Trigel glowers “I’ve had just about enough of waiting. I don’t plan to squat on this nowhere-nothing little planet while you and Thace risk life and limb. This is my universe too, Blaytz, and I won’t be relegated to the sidelines in the fight to save it.”

Thace comes to his mate’s aid “We’re not suggesting the sidelines. It’s a long term strategy. What do you think would happen if we were ambushed on our way to hide the blue? It probably won’t happen, but on the off-chance it does? That’s it. No more Paladins. The best chance to push Zarkon back is gone and the universe is doomed to be ruled by his empire for as long as he sees fit to live. And with the amount of quintessence in his system that could be absolute eons, Trigel. He could be in power for ten thousand decaphoebs. A Paladin needs to be here for that. This is our responsibility.”

“I fail to see how Zarkon’s weakness is our fault.” says Trigel.

Thace returns her glower “You know what I mean. It was our duty to help Zarkon. Yours, actually, because you were the ones in Voltron’s quiznakking cockpit. I understand it’s hard to keep a handle on everything that’s going on in somebody’s life, but I don’t understand how you couldn’t see that his crazy consort was working on something diabolic, or that he’d fallen under her thrall and would do anything to save her. I served them as a couple for almost an entire decaphoeb. Even I could tell Honerva was twisted and that was in the earliest stage of her madness! I was a servant! You, you people were military leaders and scientists at the top of your fields!”

The accusation is stinging. Trigel opens her mouth several times, but cannot think of an appropriate come-back.   
Thace takes advantage of her floundering to set off on the second half of his rant “Now, I’m resigned to the idea that I’m gonna die in a horrible, bloody way!” he thumps his mate on the chest “So is he. With any luck, we’ll go down together. That is the absolute best we can hope for. But you, Trigel? You’re going to make use of this ‘nowhere-nothing’ planet, alright? There’s a group of rebels on their way. Most of them are defected from the empire- Galra with mixed-species families, conscientious objectors, people who lost everything when Zarkon decreed himself the emperor. There are more of them than there will ever be supporters. They’ll come here. Soon their families will come here and the planet will be full of people whose most important goal in life is to tear Zarkon and his work to the ground. You can make this work, Trigel. You will make this work.”

“Are you finished?” says Trigel.

Thace folds his arms “Yes.”

“Am I allowed to speak for myself, or has this already been decided for me by the powerful men?”

“Oh, come on Trigel! You know my species doesn’t even have a concept of sexism.” snaps Blaytz “Don’t play that card against me. I couldn’t be sexist if you put a laser to my head, alright? Thace is right. You’re being difficult. I’m sorry, but one of us has to get out of this. Whoever puts the blue down cannot come back. Her final location is going to have to be a secret. Do you know what that means? That means Thace and I will be stuck on a planet that’s probably hostile and poisonous to us. If we survive hiding the blue at all! If we don’t that means Zarkon could very well put together Voltron again if he looks hard enough. Don’t make me explain myself. You know it’s all true. You know this is the best choice.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to like it!” 

“Nobody likes this! Nobody likes an intergalactic war, Trigel, but we deal with the shit that gets thrown at us!”

There are a few moments of angry silence that everyone uses to catch their breath. But the tension can only last for so long. It dawns upon Trigel that this might be the last moments she has to spend with Blaytz and Thace. They will want to move the blue as soon as possible. True, she could stall them by dragging the fight out, but this is not how she wants the Paladins of Voltron to end. 

Trigel launches herself at Blaytz. Instinctively Blaytz throws his arms out as if to defend himself- it works just as well for the almighty hug that Trigel gives him, though. Thace doesn’t struggle either when Trigel gropes about his collar and drags him into the hug.

“Fine,” she says into Blaytz’s chest “I’ll stay on Marmora. But I promise you, nothing good will come of it.”

He laughs “I love you too.” 

 

(Now)

The noise that comes out of Greenbean’s cockpit is something so animal and high-pitched that Shiro genuinely believes the littlest Paladin is being attacked. 

“Wait here!” he turns from the Tando diplomat and bolts for Greenbean, slapping the pockets of his over-armour jacket for his bayard. Why does he always pick the jackets with an impractical amount of pockets? 

“Pidge!” he shouts, drawing the attention of the rest of the camp.

Some of them were already looking because Pidge’s shriek was so impressive it could probably be heard outside of the refugee camp. What terrifies Shiro is that there has been no follow-up shriek. Why did he leave her sitting in Greenbean just outside of an active warzone? She’s been extra vulnerable ever since the mysterious Yoinker took her bayard.

If they weren’t looking before then the Tando crowd are definitely staring now as Shiro takes a flying leap and latches onto the edge of Greenbean’s snout. The lion slumbers on peacefully, completely unaware of what’s going on inside of her cockpit. Shiro hauls himself onto the windshield and beats a fist against it. Recently Pidge discovered she can actually open her windshield like any other bedroom window in the world- presumably as a means of a quick escape, say, if one of the lions started to fill up under water and the Paladin needed to swim for it. It’s a miracle of engineering these lions don’t just pop apart at the seams whenever they’re exposed to pressure- more so for Voltron herself.

Mercifully Shiro’s hand finds the latch and he spills inside, rolling gracelessly across the dashboard. 

“Pidge?” odd that the cockpit isn’t smeared in blood and Pidge-matter.

“Shiro, you heavy fuck.” comes a muffled voice from underneath him.

“Oh God.” Shiro rolls over and off Pidge “I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to-”

“To make a Paladin pancake?” she straightens up and re-opens a laptop “You better thank your lucky stars that my tiny, wiry body protected the laptop. If you’d crushed it then you would have crushed our chance of finding him.”

Shiro draws a blank. It has been a long, long day with another planetary liberation under the belt. It’s only going to get longer because the refugees from Klello are expected to land here soon. In the end, the revenge volcano did go off and made displaced the population of the entire comet. It will be a nightmare of epic proportions to get them all housed and set up before the week is out, which is what Shiro was just talking to the Tando diplomat about.   
Add to that how much Pidge enjoys the edge that talking cryptically gives her over the others and Shiro’s brain might just pop the hatch on his skull and show itself out if she starts to play games with him.

This must show on his face. Pidge cuts to the chase, grinning with excitement “So. You spent seventeen months staring at this guy’s ugly face. I figure, next to me, you’re one of the best qualified people in the universe to tell me if I’m seeing what the programme tells me I’m seeing. This photo? This is from Phosphoricaria, it’s a photo of the evacuation. Look, you can see Lance over there.”

“Did you really just scream and make me run like a moron to make me look at Lance? And I’ve been staring at him for eight months, not-”

Pidge snaps her fingers under his nose “Bear with me! Look, just by Lance. Look at that. Shiro, look at how close we were. There are more photos of him, coming off this ship that was helping to evacuate Klello, and standing near the lions- he was so fucking close, Shiro, but he had no idea it’s us. We don’t say our names very often. We don’t show our faces. We’re almost totally anonymous.” she wipes her knuckles across her eyes “We really shouldn’t be. And I shouldn’t’a lost my fucking bayard. Or chased the guy that took it. Maybe then I would have known he was…was right there.”

The figure Pidge has picked out of the crowd is a familiar one. Perhaps a little taller and stronger than when Shiro last saw him, but it is unmistakeably Matt Holt. 

“Holy shit.” says Shiro.

“That fucking bastard.” Pidge is sobbing by now “I thought he was dead. I thought he was dead.”

Shiro’s eyes grow wet “Holy fuck. He’s ok.”

“No he’s fucking not! Look at that stupid beard! It’s almost as ugly as yours!”

By the time one of the Tando climbs up to the windshield to check on them, Shiro and Pidge are rolling on the floor, sobbing and laughing in equal measures.


End file.
